even though i am wearing taupe nail polish and grasping hold of something that meant so much to me so long ago as a kid, i am growing up. i spent the better part of twelve hours in my room yesterday doing nothing but watching shows on my computer and through the thick of unkempt hair, questionable pajamas and mediocre comedy at times, i looked around and saw a twenty-year old. i saw me walking in heels, because heels to me have always meant being an adult, and suits or skirts and flippy hair that was not crunchy or adolescent. i see velcro rollers in my bathroom that i use which make me happier and say, "huh. i could get use to this change of appearance." i see a goal in january and two weeks worth of that gone down the tube because of christmas feasts and get togethers but i see its fruition at the end of january and something magical to come of it. i see selfishness and selflessness and destruction of old and the construction of new.

it's my dad's birthday today along with the two most precious cats in my life. they are thirteen and he is fifty, i think. fifty or fifty-one but i am pretty sure he is fifty. what do you have to say for living for half a century? is this how you thought life would turn out and if not why did you take the route you did? if i were speaking to him i would interview him on these topics and part of me wishes i still were on speaking terms with him. i will always take issue with what he did to me and what he did not provide but i think the biggest thing i will take issue with is that he isn't here. he is this incorporeal being to me that i cannot touch and he cannot reach out to me and we're in this vicious cyclical never ending moment that always ends, and starts, with yelling.

so now i am sitting here with my taupe nail polish that seems like i am trying to grasp hold of my childhood heroine because i was still just a child when she was doing all sorts of adult things. fictitious, of course, but it is still symbolic to that fact that i am grown up like she was then and still growing. sometimes tv can be read as text and you can take away more from it than just that it may be, as nietzsche described religion to be, as the opiate of the masses. a part of the mass i am and whether i like it or not that's how it is going to stay. but it is important here to the theme of some sort of identification with something, that ambiguous, ambivalent maybe, something in growing up. for three years i've tried to find something that will stick and make it bearable. instead now, for example, i am faced with old friendships that resemble a hollowed out tree; beautiful still, yes, but there is hardly any substance or girth to what is because it isn't what it was. should the tree just stay as remembrance and a metaphor for said great friendship or torn down to make room for new and possibility?

odd years have been good to me when the clock rolls past twelve and we head into a new year. but i only count them from the time i started high school because, really, that's when it all started to matter. my experiences as a kid don't matter to me anymore except their symbolic and nostalgic value because i am not who i was then but something better. there will come a time when i don't count high school and dismiss it just as cavalierly i dismiss elementary and middle years.

i suppose this is my year end rant about my state of affairs. their state is questionable at best but there is always room for improvement.

only if you want there to be.