Growing up

Currently listening to Hem, "Half Acre".

It's funny how things change.

Mom and Dad are wondering if I'd move into Mike's old room and sleep on the double bed.

My brother is married and he and his wife just bought a new house that everyone is working on fixing up - mostly painting and the like.

Every time I come home I am more disgusted by all the stuff that clogs my own room. I just want to be free from it all.

Television is disturbing - I don't think I can watch it at all anymore, and I'm glad we don't have one in our apartment.

Cars are scary, and have so many things that can go wrong with them. I've seen three recent crash scenes in my driving around the past few days. I feel increasingly less interested in having one - at least out here, where things are closer. I wish there was a decent public transit system in place around here. I can remember being a kid and thinking that cars were neat, that there was something intriguing about highways and byways.

I can remember the days when I wanted a cell phone so bad - when I thought it was cool when all the other kids got new phones. Now the company is trying to strong-arm me into getting a new phone. The salesman is a despicable materialist tool, thinking he's so cool because he's got this awesome phone and that I'm dumb and should just get a new one, but he's completely oblivious to the fact that hundreds of women are being raped and children abducted to fuel this country's blind desire for new electronics. He's just another American, capitalist fool.

Is that what growing up does? Does it make you look back on things that were once intriguing to realize that they are ugly and deformed? Does it take the mask away from the monster?

And yet there are things that I appreciate more, now that I'm older. I can feel so much in the breath of air that flows in an autumnal breeze, whistling about, shimmering sunlight, quaking leaves, the smell of damp and earth. There is no way that I can hug it tight enough to me. I take joy in answering a phone that's bigger than my head, feeling its healthy weight in my hand, twirling the chord with my other. I wish I could have a landline at school. I can't wait 'til I can actually have a landline of my own. My own plot of earth to plant and harvest. My own little home to heat in winter and decorate with drying herbs and summer harvests the rest of the year.

I am feeling out the future, starting to make tentative idea-plans as to what will be, where I will go, and what I will do. I have learned what I do not like, and I have learned to love what I do. If this is growing up, I suppose it's not so bad; in some ways I know more of what I want to have from life than I ever understood before.