This is it?

It feels weird to be able to vividly remember something that happened 20 years ago.  I was at my cousins’, watching in terrified awe as they jumped from the third step of their staircase to the carpet miles below.  I was sitting on the back of Mom’s bike, soaring through the Duck Creek Greenbelt in the early morning with the lingering taste of Raisin Bran still on my lips.  I was filling a lapse between Super Mario Bros. and Gyromite by watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  I was living on Sycamore in Garland, falling asleep in my firetruck bunk bed to Dad gently singing House at Pooh Corner.

Twenty years ago.

I don’t feel like I have twenty years’ worth of memories to pull from.  But, I can’t think of another span of time that sounds more appropriate.  It just feels strange to have my conscious existence summed up so concisely.  To me, it wasn’t twenty years ago, it was at the beginning.  The beginning of me.  The beginning of everything.

That period in my life doesn’t move, but it keeps getting further away.  I will always have been four years old in March 1988, but not so long ago that was 15 years ago.  Not so long ago, it was 10 years.  Not so long ago, it was last week.

I can still taste the Raisin Bran.

Or so they tell me.

I had planned on making a post on the actual birthday to celebrate, but it completely slipped my mind. It was such a monumental occasion, though, that I figured a belated Happy Half-Birthday to myself is better than nothing.

My aging mind is failing me.

“How does it feel to be a graduate?” they ask me. “Uhh…” “Umm….” or “Well…” are my usual responses. It doesn’t really feel all that different at all. It’s a nice relief to have it done and behind me, but since I was only taking one Summer class leading up to graduation, it’s really not all that different right now. Come mid-September, that will probably change.

In the meantime, though, I’m just kind of living life the same as I have been for some time now. It is nice to not have another semester looming over my head. Though the future is getting foggier and hazier. My main goal for so long has been to finally finish school, so now that school’s over, my goals and plans are becoming more insubstantial and indefinable. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, mind you. It just means that I’ll need to be more intentional in my day-to-day efforts in being productive and moving forward with life.

It’s easy to just keep signing up for classes, working through a previously structured degree program. It’s not so easy afterwards to really work towards a higher goal. Or, as in my case, to figure out what that higher goal actually is. Oh well. I’ve got time to figure it out, I guess. I just don’t want to stay in this state of limbo for very long. It’s kind of disconcerting.

I feel kind of like how Inigo Montoya must have felt after he killed Count Rugen in the Princess Bride.

Maybe I should consider piracy.

Beating a Zelda game is always a bittersweet experience for me. It’s kind of like finishing a great book. There’s a sense of accomplishment and closure, but at the same time you’re disappointed that what you’ve spent dozens of hours working through is finally done. The journey is through. There’s nothing left.

This is magnified for me in the case of The Legend of Zelda, because playing a Zelda game is quite honestly a nearly-religious experience for me. I anticipate it for months or even years, waiting for it’s release. I study it’s progression through interviews and articles. All the while, I fondly reminisce about the first Zelda games and the impact that they had on my childhood, hoping that the latest entry will somehow recapture some of that magic. Because, frankly, the most rewarding, mysterious, and bilssful childhood escapism of my early years came through the Zelda games, and the world that they exposed me to.

So, playing a Zelda game today is partially an attempt to somehow reconnect with the innocent, imaginative world of my idealized childhood. And though I am always able to do that to a certain degree, it is not nearly to the level that I would have hoped. There are certain themes, characters, locations, or melodies in each chapter of the Legend of Zelda that capture my imagination and reawaken that childhood joy for an instant. However, I always go into a new Zelda game with the foolish hope that it might somehow fully recapture the imagination and joy that I experienced 15 years ago. And it never does. Though the Zelda series has arguably been the most consistently excellent series in the history of video games, each subsequent release since the mid-1990s has left me slightly disappointed. It’s not that the games have lost the magic. I’ve grown up.

So, last night was bittersweet. The final battle was gripping and epic, the ending was emotional and cinematic, but I put the controller down as a 23-year-old man, not as the 10-year-old boy I had hoped to become a little bit reacquainted with.

I’ll try again in 4 years.

So, I’m barely 23. Still in school. Still at home. Still single. No career yet. Looking back, my status doesn’t seem to have changed much from 5 years ago. Sure, I’ve made some advancements in life. I’m a semester and a half away from graduation. I’ve got a few extremely awesome potential jobs on the horizon. I’ve learned a lot, and I’d like to think that I’m a much different person than I was right out of High School. But, ignoring those things, and really just looking at my “status” here, not considering any emotional, spiritual, or intellectual growth that I’ve gone through, just generally looking at where I am on the journey of life, I’m not much further along than I was right out of High School. Except, of course, for my newfound ability to make insanely long run-on sentences.

But, that kind of frustrates me. And it kind of scares me. And it kind of makes me feel like life is slipping through my fingers.

So, yes, I realize that this doesn’t really make any sense. If life-expectancy is to be believed, I’ve still got a good sixty years left in me. But, unfortunately, emotions rarely listen to the voice of reason, so even though I know that it’s ridiculous, it’s still how I feel. It seems like my life has, for so long, been more an anticipation of great things to come than anything else. While my life has, in reality, been perfectly fine, I’ve been so focused on the possibilities in the future, that I kind of miss out on the “here and now.” Now that I realize that I tend to miss out on things, because I’m so busy thinking about and hoping for the future, I am put in an unusual place. I am still looking forward to the future, and there is a lot that is likely going to happen in the next five years of my life that I’m super-excited about. But, at the same time, I don’t want to miss out on the life that I have right now. I want to take advantage of what I have now and where I am now, but at the same time, I want to be more “grounded” in life with a little more stability.

For example, some people want to wait until their older to get married and settle down. Youth is a time of freedom and self-discovery. You spend the prime years of your life meandering around, having as much fun as you can, experiencing as much as you can, and then after you’ve had your fill, then you get married and settle down. Life as you know it is over, as you start your “new” life with your spouse.

I don’t see it that way. While I’m not at all for rushing into marriage before you’re ready or anything, at the same time, I am not at all drawn to that idea of trying to enjoy as much of life as you can before you are “tied down” by marriage. Whoever I end up marrying is going to be, in my eyes, the most amazing person that I’ve ever met, or else I wouldn’t marry them. If that’s the case, then why wouldn’t I want to start my life with them as soon as humanly possible? I’m probably over-romanticizing this, but I don’t want to wait until I’m 30 to get married, just because I wanted some “alone” time before I settled down with the ol’ “ball-and-chain,” (I hate that phrase) when I could have had an extra 5 or 10 years with that one person in the world who was created just for me. I don’t want to waste the so-called “best years of my life” on myself.

Now, I’m not just sitting on the edge of my seat, waiting to leap head-long into the first opportunity that shows itself. I’m willing to wait however long it takes. But, I can’t say that I’m not a little anxious for that to at least start to take shape. ‘Cause right now, any form of stability and settling seems as distant and vague as it did right out of High School.

Why, Georgia? Why?

I don’t want to be 23 years old. When I’m 50, I’ll probably look back at this and chuckle, but I do feel like I’m getting old. Not “geezer” old, but older than I feel. 23 sounds much older than 22. 22 is still “early twenties,” but at 23, you transition into “mid-twenties.” I don’t want to be in my mid-twenties. Heck, I don’t even really want to be in my early twenties. I feel like I haven’t even gotten to really experience life, yet. I’m still in school, theoretically preparing for “life,” but I feel like life is slipping thorugh my fingers. When I was a teenager, I expected to be much further along in life by the time I was 23 than I actually am.

But, what do teenagers know, anyway? Nobody’s really got it all figured out by the time their 23. 23 isn’t that old at all. If life expectancy can be trusted, I’ve only seen about a quarter of my life thus far. …but, then, why do I feel like I’m missing out? I don’t even know what I feel like I’m missing out on. I just feel like life’s flying by and I’m missing it.

I think that might be where my real frustration comes in. I’m anxious to get out of school, and get out into “the real world” and really start my adult life. But, at the same time, I don’t want to miss anything in the here and now. I want to seize the day, and enjoy life where it is, but I always have this nagging in the back of my mind telling me that I’m getting older too fast, and I need to get on the ball. Fortunately, I’ll be done with school this May, so like it or not, I’ll be moving on to the next stage of life.

This is just an odd time of life for everyone, I think. I’m being pulled into adulthood, but I’m still holding on to my childhood. And, you could say that my childhood is still holding on to me, as well. It’s just hard to find my place. I want to become an adult, but I don’t want to grow up. And, yes, there is a difference.

I’ll explain it when you’re older.