2010

I can't believe it's 2010.

I mean, I can believe it, but it doesn't mean I have to like it.

To me, 2010 represents my adulthood.

Since graduating high school in 2000, I always looked to my ten-year reunion as a sort of milestone. I'd be out of college and working and, hopefully, professionally set, going in a good direction. I assumed that by the time I was 28 (this June ... shudder), I would be an "adult."

A very stupid thought process from an 18-year-old me, but it's what I believed at the time. Now, at 27, I know that none of it is true. I will never feel truly "adult," unless you count that time when I didn't get carded.

I'm not married with two kids and a station wagon, but I don't know why I assumed that 28 was when all of that needed to happen by (minus the station wagon- minus the minivan, too- minus any soccer mom car). I have time. Well, I don't have that much time, unless I want to use a surrogate or have IVF babies.

I may still become a crazy cat lady, living in deluded spinsterhood, next door to my crazy rabbit lady of a sister. You never know how these things do or don't work out, after all.

28 has always been a scary age for me because my mother got married the year she turned 28. In fact, she was my current age when she was married (she turned 28 three months after she married my dad). That's scary to me because at the time, my mother was told by pretty much everyone that she was an old maid. Scary, scary, scary.

Tossing fears, uncertainties, illnesses (cough, cough!), and confusion aside, here's what I've done so far this year:

January 1:
3:30 a.m. woke up groggily to take my cousin to the airport (he's going to the east coast for two weeks).
4:30 a.m. got home and crawled back into bed.
6:30 a.m. tried to get up.
6:35 a.m. really tried to get up.
6:40 a.m. got up. Collapsed. Tried again.
7:00 a.m. got to church, shivering in the cold, and made it through New Year's service. Barely.
Then had rice cake soup (떡국, pronounced "ddeok-guk" or "tteok-guk"), traditional for January 1.
8:30 a.m. got home and ensconced myself in front of the TV with my sister. Watched part of the DVR'ed Rose Parade.
Remained prone for most of the day, lapsing in and out of that strange, delirious grogginess that happens when one has been awake far too much.
8:00 p.m. (!) crawled back into bed after taking some echinacea and Tylenol cold medicine. Sniffled for a while, then slept like a dead person.

January 2:
6:30 a.m. woke up and turned on my laptop for the first time in 36 hours. Blessedly work-free 36 hours.
7:15 a.m. got ready to go to work. Oh, yes.
8:30 a.m. got to work. It's very quite and dark and sad here. And it's freezing cold.

An inauspicious start to the new year, I must say. What with the sniffling and the working and the constant confusion about what day it is (it feels like Monday today), I've decided that February 1 will be the real start to my new year.

Alice-time does not equal real time, so January is the new December in Wonderland.

I hope everyone on the internet has had a much better New Year's than me, without too much in the way of hangovers (though a nice spicy Bloody Mary will fix that right up).

Happy 2010!