dear...

dear...blogosphere? universe? God? friends? self?

forgive me--i am unsure who my audience is right now.

i am starting my job, a new job, my first "real job" tomorrow morning (sure i don't finish school for another 2 weeks...). so there, people, consider yourselves updated. i will be working for "the man" in the city i've been living in for the past 2 years. ...not necessarily where i'd have guessed i'd be 2 years ago when i was beginning to pack my stuff up in teeny tiny northwest tanzania.

my friends have no less going on. one has just graduated grad school. another is recently in love. another just moved back from africa. sept 19 will see me in bridesmaid dress #4 for 2009. i just got photos of baby henry, the first baby born to a friend who i stood next to when she married (5 years ago). and another dearest friend has just lost her father, a wonderful man i had the pleasure of getting to know over the past 8 years.

i'm trying not to feel so adultish (with the immediate desire to rebel against adulthood...)

what does madeleine say about this...

"...I will also grow into maturity, where the experience which can be acquired only through chronology will teach me how to be more aware, open, unafraid to be vulnerable, involved, committed, to accept disagreement without feeling threatened (repeat and underline this one), to understand that I cannot take myself seriously until I stop taking myself seriously--to be, in fact, a true adult."
(A CIRCLE OF QUIET, 132)

"I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be... This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages...the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide... Far too many people misunderstand what *putting away childish things* means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I'm with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don't ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child's awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup."
(A CIRCLE OF QUIET, 199-200)

-madeleine l'engle

and with that, blogosphere, goodnight and goodluck...until we meet again,
c