grown ups.

My friend Vanessa is getting married. I'm happy for her! But it got me thinking, I am so not a grown up. And that also got me thinking, actually wigging but thinking was involved. Ness and I are the same age. Actually I'm 6 months older for for the sake of argument we are the same age. We started high school together. She was the person I got drunk with for the first time, and I was in her car the first time she went out without an adult in it. I was also with her the time we borrowed-without-permission her parents car and went to Buffalo to do some shopping. All very immature things to do. They were also quite fun.

And now she's getting married and thinking about stuff like weddings and down payments on houses.

I'm thinking about this research paper on Grey's Anatomy and where am I going to get a Luna Lovegood costume in my size for the Harry Potter Book 7 launch.

I am not a grown up. I feel like I should be since I'll be 23 next month. But I know I'm not one yet. I've been mulling over this whole grown up thing in the back recesses of my mind for a few hours (It was banished to the back because I was working on said research essay). Maybe I'll never been a grown up because my thoughts on what it means to be one keep changing. When I was like 12 I thought being a grown up instantly happened on your 18-th birthday. Boom, you wake up and everything is different. You start worrying about bills and retirement funds and you're instantly responsible for everything in your life. I also thought at age 12 that I would have finished school, got married right away and had kids by age 23. Pffffft. Not interested in that right now.

Later on as the 18 mark drew ever closer and I realised I'd still be in high school when I was 18 because I wanted to go to university now and that required OAC. so I revised the grown up idea and I thought that high school graduation was the magic moment of grown-up-ness. I'd put on my mortarboard and ugly polyester gown, pick up that piece of paper and and Boom! I'd be a grown up. Yeah that didn't happen either. I learned that I wasn't ready to be all independent yet. I still wanted my mommy to do my laundry and I sucked at remembering to pay bills on time if someone didn't remind me.

Then I took a year off, turned 20 ('Maybe when I turn 20. It's a big number. No longer a teenager' I thought. nope). Then I started University. At this point I knew that being a grown up was not in sight. As long as I was in university I wasn't going finish growing up. Its impossible to finish growing up when you're not really exposed to a world outside learning. I'm still here. Trucking away on my useless degree that I can't help up love and a new thought has popped in my head.

We never finish maturing. We get older, we experience new and different things and that means our knowledge of the world keeps growing and how we look at it keeps changing. Sure, that learning curve slows down but it never stops. So do we ever finish growing up? The idea of a grown up seems kind of silly now. I'm not ready to stop being a kid. I'm happy to be getting excited about book launches and spending more hours a week reading textbooks than I spend sleeping.