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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Young readers talk about "alternative" relationships, cleaning up after the boomers, Kurt Cobain, the desire to love and be loved, and more.
Sep 18, 2002 | Read Part 1 and Part 2.
Old and infantile
I turn 24 in nine days and I feel incredibly old and yet surprisingly infantile. Perhaps I can explain this, but odds on I can't.
Right now I'm a bit worn out. After being unemployed for four months I now have a job at yet another start-up, making exactly one-third the money I was making at my last job. My car blew up a month ago, and I've just gotten another one for $200. My job makes me work strange, odd hours like 3am-9am, and this is job number eight in my career of six years. I feel like every startup has taken two years off my life.
All of those things make me feel old. I left school to pursue my work, and I've worked 60- and 70-hour weeks at times. Those are the things that you do when you are young but make you feel like you're an old man with popping joints and jaded eyes. Typical dot-com burnout, I guess.
At the so-called height, I was making twice what my father was. In any terms, an obscene amount of money. All of it is gone now, pretty much -- a lot of lunches, a lot of going out to dinner, and a lot of rent payments. I was supposed to be an adult, but I was just a geek who was being paid to do what he had always done.
Now, after the crash, I feel old from everything that has happened but still young for what is in my future. Tomorrow I start one class at a local junior college -- Intermediate Algebra. I got a D in it five years ago. I think I can get an A in it now, I'm pretty sure. Nothing makes me sure except looking at all of the things I have done at work. In school, they try to help you learn. With the computer industry, they don't care about learning, they care about doing. In six hours. And please move it into production tonight.
Taking the placement test, I felt old. I looked around -- some of these people are still in high school. Then I felt young again, knowing that I was in school and going to be learning things this time around instead of playing Tetris on my HP calculator. To have the earnest interest of youth, that seems to amount for a lot.
I skateboard. Sometimes off and on, sometimes fanatically, but it doesn't matter. When I am on my board I am ageless. I am 8 years old careening down the driveway. I am 14 learning how to ollie for the first time. I am wearing combat boots and am skating a deck with skulls on the bottom and it's 1989. I am 17 and almost getting mugged behind Best Buy. I am 22, sitting on a curb near my apartment watching the airplanes go overhead and sweating.
I have been seeing an older woman for eight months now. She is 39. She was 37 when I met her, when I told her that she didn't look a day over 26. We were friends for a long time before getting involved. She seems so young in so many ways. She has so many friends, of all different ages. Her mother is mentally ill and she is the only one in the family that takes care of her. She loves animals, and houseplants, and children. Of all of the people I could be involved with, she is tremendously loving and supportive.
She is older and feels young to me. When people see us together, they don't really notice an age difference. Our relationship makes me see things from a different perspective, but the wisdom we share is definitely a two-way street. We laugh at the generational differences -- I have grown up with computers my entire conscious life, and to me a Nintendo controller is just as intuitive as a telephone. She finds interesting my fetish with vinyl records and doing some of my writing on a 1955 Smith Corona Sterling typewriter.
I feel like I haven't answered the question, really. What is it like to be young? Being young to me is realizing that I have a few more times I can fuck up before it really matters. I'm thinking of buying an old VW Beetle. I go to punk rock shows and write music reviews. I'm doing some of the things I really should have done in high school. I don't view this so much as regression as tying up some loose ends.
Being young to me is trying to convince myself that anything is possible. Being wise to me is realizing over the past six years that money has never made me happy.
Being young is drinking a 40-ounce bottle of Olde English 800 in a parking lot and being hung over for work the next day. Being wise is skipping the 40, going to the show, and taking two aspirins and going directly to bed so that you can get up and enjoy your weekend.
Being young is skateboarding and falling down a lot and getting angry. Being wise is skateboarding and falling down a lot and realizing that gravity teaches you things.
Being young is watching MTV and wishing you could be a part of it. Being wise is realizing that you don't need anybody else to tell you how to make or listen to music, and stepping out of your role as consumer.
So, in some ways I'm young, in some ways I feel old. I really don't know what else to say.
-- Kevin Jamieson
