Declamations from the height of my great age.

It's my last day to be twenty-six. There will be no birthday celebration, unless you count the angelfood cake and sweetened strawberries that I made myself yesterday and will be eating with Eric tonight, and no birthday present until I order my spinning wheel, which I haven't done because I don't feel the time is right. (What's really going on is that I'm in the miser phase of my financial-emotion cycle. Wait until I get back to the eager-to-buy side, otherwise known as Being My Father's Daughter.) And I'm okay with that. I want to ease into twenty-seven anyway.

I'm starting to notice true signs of aging--very slight, of course; but I'm definitely not as limber as I used to be, or as easily recovered from a night of little sleep. And of course there are all the mental adjustments that I continue to go through: am I really mostly through my twenties? Do I feel like an adult yet? How did I get here? Am I satisfied with how I've spent my time? How do I improve myself for the future? What do I really want out of my remaining time on the earth, and how do I get it?

Which is not to say I consider myself old or anything. I don't suppose people often do; you don't live seventy or eighty or ninety years all at once, but one day at a time, and one day is the only rock we have on which to stand. But I know I've now got probably a third of my life behind me, and I still don't know what's ahead. This whole getting married thing has helped with that, but only a little; I'll be living here two years, then on the West Coast two years; we hope to have children, and fairly soon; and that's about it. These things help to shape my awareness of the future and my plans for it, but they only help.

As a twenty-six-year-old, I have worked at a job I didn't like with horrible management; found a job I do like with good management (and much better pay); lived with someone else for the first time since 2002 and for the first time ever with a guy (well, one not related to me); planned most of a wedding; taken up gardening; saved quite a bit of money (oh, there's another post related to that--maybe tomorrow, if it's resolved then); worked on clarifying what actually makes me happy. There's more work to do, of course, but that's life.

One thing I need to do as a twenty-seven-year-old is sort out my hobbies and time-drains so that I actually have time to work on some things. And walk more. One thing about my previous job, it made me healthy (mainly because I spent as much time as I dared running up and down the stairwell, partly for exercise and partly out of frustration). I'm afraid I will not look buff and impressive in my wedding dress. But I'll look like me, which is what I'm working towards being all the time.