I ran into an old friend this weekend.

Ok, see, I already started off wrong. He was not a friend – well he was, but let me finish – he was more like the object of adoration for every bijork-loving girl in my high school. He and all his brothers. They were a little druggie, a little avant-garde, a little philosophy and a lot of good old Italian guapissimo all mixed in with a dash of humility that made them uniquely irresistable. So you know, I never made a pass at him but it was always like, hey wow, guy, if I was a little more forward, your girlfriend would hate me.

Resuming: I ran into an old friend this weekend who, I had heard through the grapevine, just recently got married. Our meeting was cause for a leap of my heart, as despite always having found him very easy on the eye, I also consider him a kindred spirit of sorts and had lost track of him over the past few years. So it turns out he’s back in the area and ready to become a dad. After the sqealing of my congratulations and the doling out of several more ecstatic hugs, we exchanged numbers and parted ways.

Here we come to the meat of the post.

So I am always feeling either impossibly old of impossibly immature, depending on who I talk to. When speaking to my dear friend in LA, who is doing freelance camerawork and enjoying lazy beach-combing afternoons that stretch into nights of vodka-fueled clubbing, I feel staunchly puritan and definitively lame. However, this Sunday, for the first time, I felt IM-mature. Like, what am I doing fucking around with this weird job and all the boozing? Other people are HAVING KIDS for Chrissakes, and BUYING HOUSES. Even the hippest of the hip high school heartthrobs, the ones you used to think would move to Seattle and perhaps succumb to a glamorous heroin addiction after a long affair with an independent folk musician, EVEN THEY are settling in!!

And here am I, stuck squarely in the middle. Not so crazy, not so cool. I’ve always been this way – kind of wanting to toe the line to something truly bizarre and at the last minute pulling back because what about my grades / scholarship / IRA payment and then kind of hating myself for it. But I’ve come to grips, dammit!!!

Or maybe I’m just at the tip of the iceberg…