Saturn Return

I've been watching, shit, another sentence beginning with I've been watching, a lot of shows that deal with 30 year olds, like Sex and the City on the computer. Other than realizing how crappy the writing and characterization in that series is, I've kind of been observing that lifestyle and feeling 21 going on 30 in the magical way that you know it's safe since its not true. The same way I ask my dad "are you cheating" because I'm hoping it's not true. But I watch movies so I have to get the parallel advice from my parents about real, functioning relationships. 30 years old, in astrological jargon is the time of your Saturn Return. Saturn is a planet that deals in the harsh reality, so the years around this time are a reality check and usually difficult things happen. Basically, you've made your bed and now you consider whether you choose to lie in it. As you reflect on the things you did to get to this point, you grow up. This usually involves leaving or staying in relationships, reevaluating the way you deal with the people you know. It's a pretty scary time and often people you love die in it. Carrie and the rest of them have made their bed as single women and are considering whether to settle down, continue recycling relationships, as well as other dating problems. I've said it before, this and other stuff I've seen Sarah Jessica Parker in makes me cynical about relationships, particularly the fear of smooth sailing.
This idea seems to imply that we're babies at 21, or as a man I knew said "women are idiots until 26, men until 30." I read Joan Didion's essay, "Goodbye to All That," in which she talks about how she lived in New York for 8 years since she moved there in her early 20s and why she decided to leave. She calls it a city for the very young and the way she talks about appreciating so much more coming from Sacramento, California reminds me of the Midwest hipsters that move to Williamsburg. She can't imagine people from the East appreciating it as much as someone from far West bumblefuck who's never heard of it. I think she's wrong there, she's never met someone from Connecticut who would go there occasionally with parents whose idea of a New York outing meant getting up at 6:00, driving there at 9:00 for a museum, a theater production, dinner, and then leaving full of purpose. "Cultural" people like my parents. Or what it means when you can get up at 12:00, take a 15 minute van or 40 minute train that comes regularly and is at walking distance, and stay till fucking 6:00 in the morning the next day if you so desire. It is a city for the very young and the very not from there, I couldn't have said it better myself. When you're that close, you want to go every fucking weekend while you were far enough away before to come maybe once every month. I sympathize with a recently graduated senior I met on the last train to Fairfield who scored a job in an ad agency but still lives with her parents, except unlike her, I wouldn't have to be forced to come to happy hour.

Aanyway, she talked about how naive and happy she was, how she saw the world and New York as a new opportunity until at the ripe age of 28 every sight in New York began to seem the same to her.
Before Sunset, one of the most depressing movies to me, is a Saturn Return movie. It is our 30 year old selves looking back at our 23 year old selves and forecasting that the world full of opportunity is closed. Julie Delpy says that it makes her sad to think how much she believed in the possibility of romantic love on the night, she and Ethan Hawke review their past relationships and reflect how important a missed chance was and how their longterm lives turned out a mess. She slaps me, the viewer when she says, wake up, the world is a mess and doesn't even accept the possibility of good. It's weird to know that all the doors you think are open will close.

I hate how this mindset doesn't take 21 year olds seriously, yet my 23 year old friends comment that they feel old. What kind of Saturn Return is 21, when you're legally an adult? Me, I feel like I'm at the top of a downward rollercoaster, on the brink of sliding toward 30, when I'll feel like my days are numbered and start telling kids about how time flies.
Other than that, there's the open book of senior year. Even when a friend of mine that was a senior this year was drunk, she was telling me in the Malt House bathroom, "I don't know what I'm going to do with my life next year, I mean, I haven't heard from any of my grad schools, I don't have an apartment." I know everyone will be scared shitless. If they find a decent apartment and some job with hourly wage that has nothing to do with their background, they'll whine to me like my friend who sent out tons of job applications in the past two weeks that they miss college because they have so many responsibilities now.

I figure 21 is the age when you begin to make your bed. It's frightening because you may or may not find a (shitty) place to live with a roommate further away from Brooklyn, maybe in Astoria, maybe in Kensington or further, Brighton Beach. It will take you months to find a job even if you have a good GPA, likely in the storage section of a bookstore if you're lucky, with an hourly salary because the idea of getting $30,000 a year after your BA is a dream for someone with no major and "writing skills." As in research paper writing skills. Likely you're weekends will be spent with microwaveable burgers or going to free events around New York.

What makes the 21 year old so happy go lucky, so ready to travel to France with $500 and live in squatter settlements is like The Fool in the Tarot. You can choose to take the path of someone who goes with the flow and mysteriously ends up in foreign countries (teaching in South Korea, backpacking in Vietnam..) claiming to have no money. Most people do this throughout college and some in high school. Or you can pretend that this time doesn't present you with serious choices if you're like me and not quite done with being an undergraduate student. You can hope things will sort themselves out because you're a few years behind everyone else in development. The fool has their eyes to the skies and past some of the barriers that are actually in front of them, but I think the influence of the actually Saturnian age of 21 pulls you right down to graduate school or job, professor or editor, cupcake baker or cashier.

School starting

School is going to start. I decided to come to it with a healthy satisfaction with my own summer and a healthy refusal to be jealous of anybody else's. I decided to say, no matter whether they were in Paris or Africa, they must have been lonely or had lousy times occasionally as well. Because I remember the times I would finally go abroad on a trip and be completely dissatisfied. My trip to Paris when I was 14, I was depressed for the first two days and didn't really like the city, but liked Provence a whole lot better. I claim that I just didn't know to appreciate it back then to vindicate my Paris obsession. (For my birthday in senior year of high school, a friend got me a sign for my door that said I'm in Paris, come back later). Almost all the time, I would be upset about one thing or another when abroad, though. Lonely and embarrassed or uncomfortable because I've only ever traveled with my parents, unhappy in the knowledge that I should and ought to be happy but am not.. I imagined a map of the world with me as a before and after dot to compare how far away I was from the US when I travelled to Ukraine and to dramatize that I had never been there, but like I settle into losing things I really care about, I got blase about being in a place I never visited before. I got used to Thailand, Italy, Germany this way and then when I come back, I dream about going to Europe for months. My mom says this is because I'm never satisfied about where I am in the present moment and never will be (this is her cop out when I complained to her about Sarah Lawrence as if I'm trying to place responsibility on her), while I try to remind her that I have been happy before. When I told her that everybody complains about Sarah Lawrence, she says that it's our "artistic temperament" that makes us dissatisfied with everything. When I wanted to transfer, I would watch how people would say that they were much happier in other colleges. As far as whining about wanting to go abroad alone, my mom's first reaction is to cut responsibility from it with "We're not stopping you." Yeah, but fuck all are you helping.

But then I went on the facebook. The place I learn what normal people do or would like others to believe they do. And of course I'm jealous of the people that went to Africa and Buenos Aires and want to pretend that their parents funded it all or to ignore the friends that come back all transformed from abroad. I won't even bother asking them how it was. The American tradition is to either say 'fine' or to give a partial answer that I can't bother waiting to puzzle out in their later passing remarks and stories. I get overwhelmed enough when I think someone sincerely wants to know how I passed the time and am meanwhile trying to remember all the details myself. It's weird, the in between path is bad, the full revelation is exhausting even though I have to chronicle a trip I took for myself in full, and the 'fine' is a big fuck you. If they say fine, I am not going to juggle around for the appropriate questions to get them to spill it. Saying instead of how was your summer, 'What did you do this summer,' (every week of all three months, I mean), 'What things in consecutive order did you do every day of this summer,' I have no time to figure out how to rephrase these questions while they get annoyed. I'll probably just write them off for a while. I don't know how to seek an empathetic middle ground where I don't try to see their humanity by saying that they must have had tough times too or enviously make them out to be something more than human, a smiling, travelling, simple person, the kind that according to my mom don't go to my school. Plus ignoring them with an "I bet the change that took place in you your junior year abroad is so overwhelming that I don't even want to hear all or half of it, or to talk to your modest ass until you get in the depressed Sarah Lawrence rut and forget you were ever enviable" is pretty stupid anyway.

I'm reading The Bell Jar right now because I never have and I think I'm starting to sound like Sylvia Plath's main character. I thought it was supposed to be dark and kind of forbidden like Go Ask Alice. What strikes me is all the antiquated expressions (gosh!, I can't think of any, but so weird to think that Sylvia Plath thought or talked like this, you'd think her cosmopolitan and Bloomsbury) and ideas, the lack of options girls of the time had. The amount of miscommunications in the book could make it a tragic situation comedy. The things that the girl leaves off saying and explaining, shite psychiatrists that give her shock treatments for no apparent reason, a mother and other people that have no idea of what's going on in her head. Tragic dramatic irony. And the dumbass things that supposedly intelligent people or the misguided adults in the book say. I could never picture rich, college educated girls in wild New York waiting to be scooped up by a career man or someone who hates the idea of marriage to have a broodful of kids and a husband as a back up plan in the whole book, typists, shorthand...