in a glass house.

In many ways, this summer takes me straight back to a simpler time. Though I constantly wonder where my next paycheck will come from, I have no real concerns here. It feels like a continuation of my college life - even my high school life - in that deep inside myself somewhere, I feel like I will return to the safety of student loans or the safety of living at home while studying calculus and biotechnology (that was me in high school, yeah). It is hard to wake up to the fact that this is not the case. For instance, today I spent the morning running at my high school track and then going to beach. My friends and I buried each other in the sand and screamed when the icy waves grabbed at any skin above our ankles. My guy friends played frisbee, and I fell asleep with the sun hanging directly above my head.

The other night in the Mission, Saleh and I chain smoked and got into a heated conversation with two people sitting beside us on the long picnic tables outside the bar. The guy was 32 years old, and he was still dating wildly impractical people. The girl said she was 28 years old, and she complained that she was too old, that life was passing her by. It made me so upset. First, I told her that was bullshit. Besides the fact that she actually looked 23, women without children shouldn't feel their lives are over by the time they've hit 30. Of course, she simply looked at me with her eyes squinted, angry, when I told her I was 21. Of course, my protests have no effect on her; I have yet to reach an age where I can honestly say my life is not where I want it to be headed.

But I could see a little bit of myself in her. I could feel her fear, her disappointment in herself. So while my summer of repeat childhood is nice, I know this cannot last. I refuse to sit at a bar when I am 28, complaining that I am old. I don't plan on having everything figured out by then, but I do at least plan on being satisfied with my own life choices. So I'm giving myself a deadline of mid-October. If I am not happy here, I am going on a working holiday. And that is that. Because part of growing up is realizing that your endless list of choices are merely arbitrary decisions that lead you down new paths and you lose yourself and then you begin all over again. If you ever feel old, you start over new and stop the self-loathing.