thoughts on maturing (pronounced mah-tour-ing)

So yesterday I turned twenty-six. I spent the day baking peach & blueberry pies, watching Entourage, & then I drank a bunch of dark-n-stormies with my friends in the evening. It was a good time.

Somewhere in between all that, I read a letter to myself that I had written when I was seventeen, sealed with candle wax & labeled DO NOT OPEN UNTIL 26TH BIRTHDAY on the front.

I found this letter last summer when I briefly moved home. It has given me anxiety for nearly a year. I was pretty certain I would open it up & read about how by now I've met the man I'm going to marry (or have married) & I'm living in Manhattan & have a dog or some such other nonsense that would make me feel low & unaccomplished.

But this is what it said:

My Dream Summer to Be Lived When I'm 26

Destination: the Seychelles

Companion: someone I don't know right now

Residence: open-air hut on the beach

Three Items in Suitcase: white peasant tops, flip flops, sunglasses

CDs: Jimmy Eat World & a mellow mix

It goes on from there. I refuse to transcribe the whole thing because it makes me slightly want to puke a little. (Dream Summer to Be Lived When I'm 30 has this cute nugget: "Companion: husband/soul mate." So I guess that's on my to-do list now.)

Obviously, I had been reading a lot of Vogue & doing a lot of daydreaming that summer. My first reaction was, "Seriously, seventeen-year-old-me? How the hell do you think I'm going to PAY for all of this?"

My second reaction was: I was more mature at seventeen than I am now at twenty-six. I also had a very warped perspective of just how old twenty-six seemed. Because now that I'm on the other side of this letter, all I can think about is swimming in rivers & eating pie & borrowing huge stacks of books from the library. (These are all priorities that I had when I was ten.)

Then today I read this interesting blog post (reposted by Sarah Brown) & it was like a gong went off in my head. (You should really read it. It's food for thought.)

While one part of me is like, "Yes! Hear, hear! I wish on an almost daily basis that someone would teach me how to be a woman & not a grown-up girl," another part of me is like, "But I really do like watching cartoons. And wearing my golden snitch pin. And it heartens me that Zooey Deschanel can pull off the vintage baby doll look & still be considered attractive by men, because the opposite of that--the silky slinky sexy skeleton look perfected by Angelina Jolie--simply isn't an option for me."

To be honest, I'm not sure where all this leaves me. The letter & the blog post & the birthday have all got me thinking, but I haven't come to any conclusions about where I am &/or where I want to be heading as I'm dragged uncontrollably into adulthood.

But there is one thing. Making things fun is often mistaken for being immature or girlish. It shouldn't be that way. I am almost always in favor of people taking themselves less seriously. I wear lipstick primarily because I find it fun to do so, not because I think it makes me look more like Liz Taylor. Marilyn Monroe, one of the womanliest women of all time, spoke with the voice of a Care Bear. And I don't care what anybody says--Clueless is fucking hilarious.