Grownups, Memories, and other ...

... rambling thoughts you can ONLY come up with after roughly 3.5 hours of broken, interrupted, cat-jumping-on-everything sleep. So I apologize for the inevitable grammar and logic difficulties.

At some point you grow up. Some of us run towards adulthood, others postpone it to the point of utter ridiculousness. To some degree, I understand both sides. When you're a little kid, you "make believe" to be an adult. Surely you don't imagine yourself being a child-teacher? As a teenager, you want to 'grow up' so you can get out and do all those crazy things like seeing the world and staying up until 4 am. Or, you see your family bogged down in adulthood as you grow up. Broken families, debt, jobs. Who wants to do that? At some point, however, adulthood has to be acknowledged.

Adults, in the mind of kids, have no friends, no fun, no dreams.
Yeah. I can see that.
Get up, go to work. Make money to pay the bills. You don't have time for your friends anymore, and even if you did, you're so utterly exhausted that you don't really want to see them anyway. All those things you wanted to do when you were younger get shoved under the pile of housework, bills, and social obligations...Until you just fall over and die.

What good is money, anyway? Aside from the 'necessary evil' bit, what is it? It enables us to buy more goods than we really need, clutter up our lives. We lock our houses, sometimes install more locks and security systems, to protect our stuff. We'd be devastated if our homes burned down because there went all our stuff. It's STUFF. Stuff, and the ability to acquire stuff is, truthfully, neat. I like knowing that I can, really at any point, march into a store and buy my husband a video game that he may or may not play (and even more likely, won't finish) for the next few years. But yet, one of the "greatest" things we can leave our children is a big pile of stuff, for them to squabble over as they try to divide it. Stuff breaks. We can't find real contentment in the acquisition of stuff.

So, if not for stuff, what is the point in having more money than you need? Why do we subject ourselves to jobs we hate, at the expense of the things in life we love, for this stuff?
Is it that powerful? (For many, yeah, it is)

If anyone is still with me at this point ...

In grade school, you make friends, hand over fist. You've got Ashley, and Jered, and Stephani, and Yesmelda and, and, and... In high school, you have friends. In college, you start stripping friends away. Everyone from your youth starts spreading their wings and going their separate ways. You might make friends in college, you might even make a friend you retain for life there. But really, after college - how many people do you really meet that become your friends? No no, I'm not talking about the people you invite over for dinner and him and haw over various politics with. I'm talking about the friends - the people who would be there in a life crisis, who'd stay up until 4 o clock just talking with you, who know that it takes you 20 minutes longer than it should to get out the door because you can't find your shoes. The friends you don't have to make small talk with, because whether it's been an hour or a decade, you pick right back up with.

Only so many of those friends come along in a lifetime.
We're bloody idiots if we're foolish enough to let something like stuff keep us from those friends.

I know we've got a lot to learn about life, but I feel like Matt and I have been given a grasp on priorities beyond our years.

My parents (bless them, I don't mean this as a slight), are just now figuring out that stuff is painful and over-rated, that there's such a thing as being happy with less. For the first time in 20 years, my dad has a job that is NOT going to require him to travel for days to months away from his family, that is not going to require gads of overtime, that is not made up of a bunch of people with only the bottom line in mind. He makes a whole lot less than he did with IBM, but I have not heard my dad happier in many, many, many years. IBM was killing him, it really was.

We don't want to wait until we're 50 to figure that out, that people and life and happiness is worth so much more than a job.

....

I don't really live with regrets. I don't consider myself reckless, but it is what it is, and I believe that there's some purpose behind most of everything. But once upon a time, I had one of those friends. The "stay up until four o clock in the morning talking about nonsense, do utterly stupid things with, go to a bowling alley and pretend to be Australian even though you live in New Jersey" friends. I had it, and I was too dumb to forgive, forget, and keep going. What a fool. If, by some far off glimmer of hope, we ever find our way back to each others lives, it won't be the same. We'll have to start over...and considering what we had...it's humbling. I let one of those few life-changing friendships fade because I was too proud to forgive AND forget. I screwed up.

I don't think there are a whole lot of second chances, not really.
I'm not going to let what could be one of those friendships go again.