I feel old. And it has nothing to do with my birthday yesterday.

Though, I will admit I feel sad not to be 21 anymore. I know everyone will think I’m crazy, especially since I’ve already lamented being treated young. But 21 is just a youthful age. It’s like, you have your whole life ahead of you. You can do ANYTHING. And it was a really good year for me. A lot of positive (and a few negative) things happened in my life.

But now, I’m officially 22. The next real birthday that counts for anything is 25. Then my car insurance goes down and I can run for U.S. Representative. Woo hoo. But seriously, I do realize that 22 is still really young, especially for where I am in life.

But why I really feel old has nothing to do with my age.

It has to do with my j-school peers. Over the past several months/weeks I have watched them landing jobs and several, many more than I would expect so soon, moving on to second jobs. Yes, second jobs. While I’m still worrying about my best pals who graduated in May and are still on the prowl, I’m watching Facebook statuses light up with excitement by peers I quit worrying about ages ago because they had a job. And now, they’re moving on. They’ve given their year and a half and they’re trading up.

It’s scary to me, to be honest. They’re all moving on so quickly, some it seems for the sake of moving on, because isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?

My mom came to visit me in Lafayette this weekend. It was the first time she spent any time here. I had fun taking her around, showing her downtown, going to all the must-see and must-eat places. She had fun, and I realized, perhaps for the first time, how much this place has grown on me in just six months. I’ve finally figured out the one way streets and how to pronounce and spell all the Indian names.

I’m already sad at the prospect of leaving it someday. And as I watch my peers galloping toward their futures, I’m scared about how soon that someday might approach. I guess that’s the nature of the beast, right? Most people do move on from their first job within a few years, and those who don’t adopt a new home or get stuck not being able to move up. I’m not ready for either just yet. As I told one of my friends here, I’ll stay as long as I’m still learning new things, as long as there are new things for me to learn. How long that will be, I don’t know. I guess I should just feel lucky that I landed somewhere that I’m not just biding my time waiting for the next best thing to come along (as some people were and have jumped ship as soon as it did come). I really like it here, even the things I hate I can handle. I’m OK with that.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 30th, 2007 at 1:10 pm and is filed under Career, College, Family, Journalism, Lafayette. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.