Adulthood

It occurred to me yesterday -- like, really occurred to me -- that if I'm going to accomplish things by the time I turn dead (which is an age, by the way), I'm going to have to make a lot of decisions before I'm actually ready to make them. I'm generally a pretty prudent person and I think things through before I act on them. But sometimes that makes life move at a snail's pace and routines take over, prudent and otherwise. I feel like a teenage girl writing this down, especially on the web, but . . . maybe I'm just not ready to decide whether or not I should write this on the web. I'll go think about it for a little while.

Here's another decision I'm not ready to make -- how do I turn that into a piece people will actually want to watch?

It occurs to me that people make decisions all the time they aren't ready to make, I suspect. Maybe they are. I should put it this way -- I feel pressured with some regularity to make decisions I think I'm still too young to make. But more generally: I think it must be tough for a woman to have to decide about having kids by the age of 35 or so, which is where, from what I've learned, it becomes more likely that your kids will have life-threatening types of birth defects.

We have to decide about college at an age when we have no idea what we want. I know for me, I got good grades because I knew it was the thing I was supposed to do and it would get me to the next step in life, which was obviously college. Only as an adult did it become apparent to me how many other routes I could have taken. Students in Germany are making career decisions at 16, when you have to start taking the Abitur (I think I spelled it right) . . . for which you have to start making decisions about a career path. They're required (or were, this may have changed) to enter the military at adulthood or do 1 or 2 years of community service.

I can't even decide whether to take a shower or eat breakfast first. But I'm supposed to make life-changing, irreversible decisions?

(I should add here that one decision I have made is to sell my gas car. Hit me up if you read this and have $3,000 worth of numbers in your bank account and want to trade it for an actual, material object that goes vroom vroom. It just passed inspection. Yes, I put an ad for my car in the MOSAIC blog.)

Which reminds me that we're all just walking billboards in our own way, but that's another blog entry. Right now I have to go do something. I haven't decided what yet.

Probably I'm going to put my car on craigslist before I decide not to sell it.