Adult Content

Ummm, is it just me or do you not feel like an actual adult sometimes?  I swear it was just yesterday that we were playing with our friends, laughing our heads off at nothing, and ignoring our parents.

I mean most likely you are not depending on your parents for much anymore, but why do I sometimes dread that phone call from them, the one where they ask you all these questions about what you are doing with your life?  Why is it harder to ignore them now then it was then?

The other day, I even told my father how much money I had in my bank account.  I don't think I should do that anymore.  He told me I was spending too much.  I don't necessarily think he's right, but he's a tiny bit right.

However, when does all this stop being their business?  I'm in a little bit of a different situation than most people because as a full fledged adult, I lived with my parents for like four years. It was a long four years and I just moved out.  We are all still getting used to this.

I love my parents to death, but we have to understand that there are boundaries.

They actually don't read my writing.  I'm dreading the day when they do read my novel or this very blog.  They are going to be soooo  irrationally upset and they are going to make me irrational and upset.  I will act like a bratty kid.  I knew it would happen one day though, with my writing, I knew one day they would be ridiculously inflamed by it.  I was just hoping I'd be rich and famous by then.

Is it just me or do all of your relatives give you an inferiority complex?  This partly may be unique to the Indian culture, I don't know, I only have Indian parents.  But the questions after questions become so mundane.  When are you getting married?  When are you gonna have a real career?  What is this writing thing?  If you are gonna write can't you write a children's book like Harry Potter, the woman who wrote that is richer than the Queen of England?  Etc.,etc., etc.

I don't write or read children's literature, but I still feel like a child on occasion.  In general, don't you still feel kinda young?  I mean, however old you are, don't you feel like you are a kid sometimes?  Don't you want to play and nap and have recess?

When exactly did I become an actual adult?  Was it when I started college, 'cause I was naive, innocent and green then.  Was it when I graduated from undergrad and ventured out on my own to D.C. knowing no one and having nothing?  Was it when I graduated from grad school with a completed novel that was my thesis?  At what point did I stop having my childlike innocence?  

I don't think I have lost my innocence completely.  I have lost a little bit of it, maybe even a huge chunk of it, but I still have a childlike wonder about me.  I try not to take everything too seriously.  I know there are things that are serious, too serious, but even those I take with a grain of salt.  I am an adult, but I haven't killed the kid inside me.

We kids are gonna rule the world pretty soon, you know.

John Mayer put it very elegantly, "One day our generation, is gonna rule the population."  Is it just me, or do you have trouble actually seeing that happen?  Imagine someone you went to high school with becoming president.  There was one chic I went to school with who I know will make it big someday, but even that seems crazy to me now.

It's crazy to me that people that are in their thirties will be the movers and shakers of our time.  It wasn't that long ago that we were pinning our jeans to create a "tapered" look.  I mean come on, I used to wear shoulder pads for no apparent reason.

I am aware that fashion mistakes don't define an era, yet I'm just saying that my generation doesn't seem "adult" enough to run this country, or this world.

But we will.  I mean we are all gonna be forty soon, if we haven't turned that already.  Forty, for godsakes, I thought of that as so damn old.  I mean it's so strange to me that people my age will be running the churches and temples and Gurdwaras.  Aren't we gonna change something when we do have power?

Or are we gonna become like our parents generation?  Are we gonna keep the status quo going?

Probably.

But hopefully I'm gonna personally try not to turn into my parents.  Although the things that my parents did were beyond what most adults can accomplish because they were immigrants.  Imagine going to like China, starting your life over not knowing anyone or anything and making it there, having a better lifestyle than most Chinese people.  That's what my parents did when they came from India to America.

My parents are great people, they really are, and I owe them my life, but I want a different life than they had.   I want to be a different kind of adult.  We all want to do better than our parents generation financially, but how about emotionally?

I just want to be more content than my parents are.  I want to be happier.  I may not be richer than them or live in a bigger house than they do, but I want to appreciate my life more than they did.

They are not unhappy, but my parents in particular were always concerned about everyone else's happiness other than their own, they still are.



I need to be a kid again in order to be the kind of adult I want to be.  Look I still have bills to pay, I have student debt that would alarm most people, I have career issues, and lack of boyfriend issues, and issues with my very sanity.

But still I want to forget about all that and just be.  It's not easy, I wake up at like five every morning first with this alarm in my head about what my day will bring.  Sometimes I get up and try to write it away.  Sometimes I go back to sleep and try to dream it away.  Either way, I'm still scared of what the day will bring.

However, much like you, I'm trying to be more of the kind of adult I can respect.  I work hard, damn hard.  It's hard to express my feelings and thoughts in public every day.  It's hard to even come up with feelings and thoughts to share.  But I do it because I have to.  I have to because this is the nature of my work.

I know you work hard, you dream hard, and you have fallen hard at at times.  We all have.  They say a girl  becomes a woman when she gets her period.  I would agree with that.  I think a person becomes an adult the minute they can bear children and have the ability to take responsibility for their actions.  However there are people who are past Menopause who do not to act like adults.

It's all relative.

When you are an adolescent you are really in the process of becoming an adult.  When you are an old person sometimes you regress and forget you are an adult.  I am fully grown now.  Yet still sometimes I want to play pretend.  I want to pretend like I'm a totally different person than I am.  A person who has all the things I long for.  Sometimes I feel like I am pretending like I'm an adult.  I can't believe the acrobatics I have to do just to survive.

To enter certain websites you have to be an adult.  Some of these websites are nasty, some of them are informative. I may not put a warning label on this website, but I do think you have to be an adult, a real adult to understand what I'm saying, in general.

The adult in you knows what I'm saying.  The kid in you would rather go outside and play.

Let's find a balance.

nina