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"Why get married and make one man miserable when I can stay single and make
thousands miserable?"
-- Carrie Snow

A F&!#@ing Epiphany!

Last night I had an epiphany, if you will. As I drove home from a fantastic restaurant week dinner with good friends I realized that I love my life. One of the true blessings of being a single woman, is that all that energy that traditionally goes to raising children and managing a home can be focused into art, community involvement, running festivals, enjoying a job, movies, books, friends, expensive dinners, parties, bike rides and most importantly being impulsive. I’ve had this wonderful run of selfishness and self discovery, that I am not sure is over yet.

There is a strong part of me that wants to “grow up” have a partner and kids... yada, yada, yada, but I realize that to have that I will have to give up some of the wonderful freedom that I have now. And I resent that! I hate that our social norm of womanhood is this overworked working mom. While the social norm of men is not the father, but the bachelor. I live my life as a bachelor and I have to face pity from older women and the constant bombardment of the media reminding me that I should want the more “meaningful” life of family. I don’t know if that is what I really want, and I defiantly don’t want it if it means that I have to give up the wonderful things that are in my life now.

I want to create art, I want to remain an involved community activist, and I want to continue to enjoy my life on my own terms. That’s why I live in this god forsaken city. The opportunity to live the way I choose, not how society dictates is completely open here. I’m not giving up my dream of having it all, but I am in no rush to end things with a white picket fence, in fact I don’t ever want a fucking fence.

Approaching Thirty

I know that I am not old… that is not what this blog is about. I am two months away from twenty-eight and as I enter my late twenties I can’t help but look back and wonder if I’m where I want to be…

I guess I’d have to know what I wanted to be doing at this point, and I guess that has always been my problem. I’ve never had some great dream or ambition. I’ve always accepted that life is fluid, and simply gone with the flow. This approach however, has left me sort of lost. I’ve never felt any certainty about the future accept that it is coming. So I often feel as though I’m in a free fall.

There are people in my life who seem to have everything together, of course there are just as many who are as lost as I am. I hope to draw from their successes or mistakes, to formulate my… what? Future? That sounds so absolute, and I know that there are no absolutes in life. And I run back into the same problem… how do you make commitments and plans in a world where the only constant is change. How do you choose a grad school when the economy could collapse at any time? How do you bring a child into the world when there is no guarantee you’ll have health insurance? How do you fall in love when love is fleeting?

I constantly feel stuck in this loop… and it terrifies me.

I don’t know if I need some sort of concrete plan, maybe a general outline…