Oh Dear... The Finishing Stretch

I now have a month left in my twenties. For reasons I can't quite understand let alone explain, this bothers me more thna it should. On the cusp of 30, I don't feel I've accomplished anywhere near what I wanted to accomplish when I was younger, and it doesn't help that I find myself in a rut that has been going on for years. It bothers me too that I don't feel I've had the same sort of reckless fun that so many of my friends and colleagues had. Sure, I've had my good times and my bad and so on and so forth, but I it seems I haven't had the same simple *fun* that others had. And it's not as if I have anything else significant to show for it; certainly not money, which is the great bane of every grad student's existence; certainly not a wife or significant other, or children; certainly not the knowledge that my decisions were ultimately what I had to do to make me happy in the long run. I guess it's getting to me that I may have wasted my twenties, and indeed my youth so far (even as a kid, I'm told, I acted much older than I was). That giant number "30" is staring at me a little too accusingly, and a little too sternly.

I can't say I can meet that stare without flinching because, when all is said and done, I have an awful lot of regrets, a lot of things I wish I could retract or redo, a lot of ghosts of opportunities slipped away. And I can't say that despite everything I'm happy with where I'm at as the dreaded number pends. Maybe I'm evaluating my life too harshly, and maybe I'm just getting a bit down on myself as may of us do at certain points in our lives. Maybe, maybe, maybe. I don't know. My life, it seems, has become like my poetry: stalled, uninspired, and sentimental, suggestive enough of potential but always rough-hewn and over-complicated, and finally better in essence than in actuality. *Shrug* Before anyone thinks, though, that I'm launching into some sort of heavy depression, I want to assure that I am not depressed or anything like that; I guess the better term is 'disenchanted.'

Unfortunately, I'll not be sending my twenties out with a grand hurrah-- I'll just be watching them peter away. As for the day itself, I'm thinking I'll just disappear and wait for it go by. Somehow, the idea of celebrating another year, or the closing of one decade and the starting of another, seems just a little too ironic.

Man, I could use a healthy dose of utterly selfish hedonism right now. :-)