I was deep in a dream and didn't know it.

Two evenings ago, I got back from my first trip to Kyoto ever, during my school's fall break. At the time, as I was walking around the temples and experiencing the city, I kept thinking of how I would need to portray this all later on in my blog. And yet, now here I am, back at the computer but with my memories of the trip muddled enough that I have no real idea what to say, nor how to make it interesting enough to be actually worth reading.
I will try that, I think, tomorrow, and skip forward now to just talking a bit about what's on my mind.

What is stuck in my head most strongly now is that today seems like a day of realizing adulthood, however little I might feel ready to do so. On the one hand, I am still very specifically me, with all of my childishness and un-togetherness that keeps me from feeling as confident and real as I hope my adult self will be. Yet externally, things are shifting, and I can't get around that.

The first notice of this was that my dear old friend in Kyoto, whose floor I slept on this week, turned 30 yesterday. 30 is kind of an arbitrary signifier and all, and our generation has decided 40 is the new 30 blah blah blah. I am ignoring all that slacker generation bullshit for a moment, because holy god, a close friend of mine is 30. And not a friend who was 28 when I met him, either. When we first became friends, I was 17 and in my first semester of undergrad, nine-eleven had just occurred, there was no war on Iraq, there was no invasion of Afghanistan, and I was not allowed into any bars, ever. When it got cold I wore a big black turtleneck sweater I had had for many years that didn't quite fit and made me look like a beatnik. But I also often got caught in the rain dressed poorly in such outfits as in tights and a denim skirt and foam-soled mary janes, shoes that fit so badly I lost both my pinky toenails that year. I do not think I owned an umbrella or knew where to buy one. Once, I tried to make Rice-a-roni in the mircrowave, then tried to eat the uncooked rice and chicken-flavory broth when my cooking experiment failed. I do not know how I managed to live through that year.
My friend was not in the same straits precisely, as he was 23 and had already had experiences with living on his own for some time. Yet looking back it is also strange to think of him as I knew him then, dressed in vintage sweaters and constantly nervously playing with his lip ring, starting college for the second time and trying to get on the path to adulthood. I wanted to be more like him, have opinions on lots of music, wear v-neck grandpa-style sweaters, drink coffee and beer and all the rest of it. I don't know if I realized it then exactly, but I do remember trying to buy similar sweaters and feeling excited and special when he would pass me filled-out punch cards from the coffee shop he worked at so I could get free drinks. Making a friend at all that year, but especially a cool older friend who made fun of my age but would still hang out with me anyway, was a triumph that probably remained unmatched until I made the next big social step and started dating. And though now I have flown the coop twice, to LA and Japan, and though I can now dress myself and feed myself with a relative amount of ease, I still feel a strong connection to that first year of 'freedom', before I had any idea of what was to come after it.

The second notice of my reality of adulthood is marriage, and how even though there is more distance between me and being married than there is between me and the moon, it is an institution I can not get around encountering. My closest friend here in Yokohama, or perhaps a better way to name her would be my confidant/big sister lady, is totally married. And has been, again, since I was about 17 and wandering around in the rain in brown tights and black shoes. Her husband can't be with her for this year in Japan, so I met him last night for the first time, but I felt a bit as if I already knew him. I had heard bits and pieces about him already, of course, but the real reason was that he has almost the same exact voice as the boyfriend of a close friend back home. While I talked to him, it was hard to not point this fact out, even though I knew it would come across as irrelevant and maybe a little creepy. Yet, there it was, the voice of someone I knew coming out of someone I didn't, and as I listened I felt very far from home indeed.
I think until I was talking to her husband, however, I hadn't fully realized that she was married.
That the whole ridiculous backbreaking anxiety-ridden quest to beat loneliness and find a partner had been over for her. Yet, there it was: this man was her husband and she and he had sat down and decided that they were going to be with each other, faithfully, even while they were still young enough to be out partying and working crappy part-time jobs and hating their parents. I think the biggest surprise in all of this isn't the reality of love or faithfulness, but that people I know and have befriended had the ability to make that kind of decision. That is an Adult Thing, and you cannot get around it.

So here I am. I have become something of an adult, and maybe it did not happen until this year, but I am beginning to feel like it happened. Now is a time when I can stop saying that I might, for instance, abandon grad school and go try some other life, to avoid the weird feeling I get from telling people I am going to be a professor. Because, well, I am. I decided that. Think of how many other things I must have the power to decide as well.