Grown up

I don't usually feel very grown up. I just feel like an old kid. Like I'm still 12 or 17 or so. Even though I have a job, pay bills, blah blah, I just feel like a kid. But I just started feeling slightly more grown up, and even so, I still feel like a kid who's trying too hard. I met the Cleveland West Road Runners for a run on Saturday morning down at the GORGEOUS Rocky River Reservation. (Towering pines, enormous sycamores, ferns, deer...there are over 30 miles of trails in the Reservation and they are gorgeous!) After a nice eight mile run, I joined them for breakfast at a nearby coffee shop. Lawyers, engineers, teachers, salespeople, accountants, chemists, technicians...these are not ethnomusicologists or anthropologists or Latin Americanists. It's a first for me to be surrounded by so many normal people. (No offense to my delightfully abnormal cohorts whom I love dearly!) And it made me feel so grown-up! I know, I'm a dork who's about to turn 30, but whatever! I'm no grown-up! And I like grad school because I can feign perpetual youth and intellectual bravado. But the real world is kinda neat too, sometimes. I still want grad school back, and I still want to teach at a university, but for the time being, I think I'm having fun growing up.