12.29.2004

[Musings] D'oh! I knew I forgot something...

Yeah I have been forgetting to update my blog. I hope I haven't lost too many readers. Things are starting to quiet down. New job and the holidays have kept me busy.

The holidays are mixed times for me. On the one hand I enjoy the holidays, the traditions, the trappings of the various spirits, etc. I don't like the commercialization, but that is part of living in a capitalist society, if someone can make a buck, they will. On the other hand I also dread the holidays. As I have grown up I have become more distant from my family as we have all gone our separate ways and lives. I do honestly make an effort to find common ground with my family, but as the years go by I find there is less and less we can talk about. I have become more urban and cosmopolitan, while my family remains more rural and down to earth. This isn't a bad thing, it is just different. Our daily experiences of life do not move in the same ways anymore. Common ground does exist (i.e. politics), but politics grow old after discussing it every holiday. Some of it is also that my mother, after almost 30 years is starting to learn that her son is no longer 11 and interested in dragons, castles and wizards (well I still am, but on a more intellectual level and not in the figurine way).

My friend (happy birthday Jer!) turned 30. We promptly sent him to carousel (or carrousal as the movie credits call it) and recycled him for his constituient nutrients. I turned 30 soon as well. Wow, what happened to my 20s!?!?! I don't think I would want to go back and re-live them, especially parts of my later 20s. But I wish I had the body I had when I was 20, the ability to stay up 36 hours straight and sleep 18 hours at a time. Now I find it hard to stay up past 11pm and sleep longer than 9 hours.

Ah well enough for now, I am just rambling anyways.




1 comment:

AllThingsSpring said...

Thanks. Turning 30 was a much bigger deal to me than turning 16, 18, or 21.

I too have felt that I seem to have less and less in common with the rest of my family. I'm fairly close with my parents, but that is about the extent of it. The rest seem to be far more conservative and far less urbane than I aspire to be. The feeling that I don't fit into the current American Suburbanite mold very well is quite clear (most of my joy is in Uptown and on Nicollet Mall). The holidays always means stress and travel (which I detest as a general rule), as well as trying to scrape by on what food is served that I can eat (vegetarian). I've tried to 'opt out' of the holidays, but to no avail. They keep guilt-tripping me and sucking me back in.

As for 'cosmopolitan', I'm pretty sure that that is a word on par with 'terrorist', the way people seem to act. I've written some on this, and it seems that very few of the people I know really accept or appreciate cosmopolitanism as something to aspire to. So many seem to be bound up in their own little myopic fictions, and provincialisms abound.