The most confusing part about becoming an adult, for me, is realizing that all of the things about myself that I thought would just disappear quietly once I was holding a college diploma didn’t actually do that. Confusingly, the inner turmoil caused by having to choose between lining your eyes with cheap black eyeliner and getting into an older boy’s car to smoke cigarettes instead of wearing your khaki skirt to the children’s hospital to volunteer for the National Honor Society does not disappear with puberty, or even with college. The same dilemma – the conflict between becoming the kind of adult you always saw in movies about families with houses that looked clean, and the kind of adult you are just learning exists, the fun kind – is very much alive and real. It was easy for me to assume that adults like Dennis Quaid played in movies were just born that way, with briefcases and matching suits and wives in housedresses who didn’t seem to have to learn to bake pies. Adults like Meg Ryan, with cute apartments and kind of fun jobs that allowed them to have contact with children without being the teacher who had to wipe their snotty noses, were that way because they had chosen to stay single and unloved. And now, even though I have a job and an apartment and three (!) outfits that I bought at Ann Taylor, which my mother says makes me a “real person” who can no longer use plastic silverware, the internal conflict between the adult versions of the people I was in high school has not silently become a non-issue like I anticipated. In fact, it is even more crushing than it felt while I stared down the popular hockey player in a polo shirt who wanted to take me to Homecoming and play mixed doubles with me and the greasy guitar player in tight jeans who may or may not have actually been old enough to buy me a PBR but was able to get me into his show for free. I thought that I would gently float into one of these personas, and my decision to love either money or fun would seem evident and inevitable.
The problem is that both these lifestyles are still slightly appealing. Unfortunately in the adult world, it takes money to have fun, which makes it hard to pick which goal to focus on. I am still equal parts tortured Bohemian who does not brush her hair, sticks metal through her body parts, and enjoys drinking warm beer out of a can while sitting on an amp during a school night and pretending that smoking doesn’t cause cancer, and the aspirational trust fund chaser who swoons at the sight of a jaunty boat shoe and a yacht club membership and dreams of turning in early after putting four brats to sleep in Lily Pulitzer pajamas and looks forward only to the weekend, when it is acceptable to down more than one martini at the club. I seriously cannot decide if I want to make a life out of working at a non-profit in artistically assembled outfits while drinking free trade coffee and dreaming of the day when I will have saved enough of my paltry salary to shop at Whole Foods, or if I would rather pick out color-coordinated linens and volunteer at the children’s hospital and watch as someone else delivers organic wheat germ from Whole Foods to my door.
Eventually I know you have to pick a team. My rants about the ills of consumer society and my desire to distinguish myself through body art and the rejection of hair straightening will shortly stop being endearing, interesting, or excusable. Eventually my parents are going to start looking for the payout that comes after funding my irresponsible young adult years. And I am going to have to decide whether that payout will come in the form of really, really committing myself to the non-profit, or sending in a graduate school application after all, or biting the bullet, straightening my hair, and finding a goddamn husband. I feel like I’m still a child, and I should be able to go on a date at a dive bar and talk about the importance of pretentious artistic expression on Friday, and then clean up to go on a date at the club on Saturday while showing off my ability to sort and categorize cocktail napkins and Christmas card address lists.
I’d like to think that I can make a go of it on the moral high ground, and that I’ll never vote Republican, but it still isn’t that simple. The thing is, even from the moral high ground, a vacation home on Martha’s Vineyard still looks like an awfully fun way to spend the month of August. Even as I renew my bus card, part of me dreams of resting my freshly lipo-ed ass on the soft leather seat of a late model Volvo with state of the art heating and cooling systems as I drive the next generation of WASPs to their various socially acceptable suburban activities. As I consider the logistics of keeping a fish alive in my apartment and decide whether or not it is morally reprehensible to apply for food stamps with my Americorps stipend so I have more money to buy beer, the other half of my brain is envisioning a flock of dogs in various forms of poodle mix romping across my electrically fenced acre as I toss an organic salad for my husband, who is parking his Mercedes in our three car garage.
Part of me knows I can’t be Jack Kerouac forever, that I’ve got to get off the road, that the only reason kids read this book when they’re eighteen is because that’s the only time this book seems reasonable and not like an incredible waste of money and gas. But this part of me almost certainly conflicts with my plans to avoid dating men who can defend a free market society in fifty words or less while whipping out their Daddy’s Platinum cards to pay for our drinks.
