Twenty-seven

One week ago today, I watched my sister pledge the rest of her living days to one man.  It was in a mountainous part of America, a bit chilly, with many attendees and, in my opinion, a little light on the hors d'oeuvres.  I wore a suit.  If you've witnessed an immediate family member swear their soul to the guy (or gal) taking up the fifth placemat at the dinner table, you get it.  Nostalgia, pride, joy, all of that.  Well-wishing.  I even shed a few tears. 

And of course there was family, as were family friends.  It was the horse stable of all the stable relationships that existed and formed around me in my formative years.  A few new ones too.  And it went without saying that I would not have a date.  And it went without saying that my unique forms of employment were, um, interesting.  And it went without saying that uprooting to move to New Orleans on a whim would not elicit approval from your dear grandparents may they rest in peace. 

I'm the prodigal son, not quite the black sheep, but definitely the apple that fell from the tree, found the steep embankment and just kept rolling on and on and on.  I know it, I own it, my family makes a genuine, heartfelt effort to tolerate it.  None of this will likely change. 

Or, will it? 

I watched my sister, seven years my junior, do the second-most adult thing a person can do and reflected on the fact that more than half of my net worth has a power button and an Apple logo.  She's well on track to make me an Uncle during the next presidential term and I cannot even commit to buying health insurance.  Which is all to say that we have differences in personality, and these differences have manifested themselves through lifestyle choices.

I could embark on the solid riff residing in my heart about the dangers of consumption and the emptiness it leaves behind; I have it in there.  It's not that I want to start looking for meaning in conventionality and I know there's not a living room set that will help me achieve Nirvana.  But there's something to be said for Stability, planting one's roots besides the other willows and saying I Shall Not Be Moved.  Committing to a course and seeing what other chips fall as they may around me. 

Bear with me, a Tangent (I'll bring it back around):

I have this theory that every adult without children in New York City is twenty-seven years old.  Those that are younger in age are forced to adapt to a more mature lifestyle because this city's mechanism for Natural Selection will cast out the Weak Beaks.  Those that are older parade around in the delusional fantasy that they are younger better smarter and more gorgeous to boot, fueled by red wine, fashion, quaint eateries, and the amorphous notion that they are the first to be informed.  It all adds up to a feeling of superiority.  Show me a frat house in revelry or a sotted hobo in the street, and I'll point to the crowd slothfully exiting the black tie after party of a Lincoln Center performance.  Because they're all drunk, they're all escaping, and they're all the same.  Put me in that lot as well.

So what I think I'm trying to say is that I just spent enough time outside the Twenty-Seven Bubble to feel like the shoe no longer fits.  I am thirty-two, and while I aver that I will never be that old, however old that happens to be and act whatever the norms attendant, I realized that I'm also not so as much into post-collegiate Arrested Development.  Maybe it's time to make it unmistakeably clear to everyone that I've gone from Boy to Man.  Which is all to say I'm going to get a dog.