ain't nothing but a number / decade of choice.

The record is beginning again.  I turned 28 on Sunday. 

I started really thinking about the changing of the number a week before.  I was waiting in line at my favorite big box bookstore when this tiny blonde girl with wire-rimmed glasses told the clerk, "Thank you for the words you said."  This was right after she had said she wished she could be like the clerk because she wants to be grown up.  When she is, she explained, she wants to be a teacher that teaches either K or pre-K.  The clerk asked her if she was in K or pre-K.  No, she said.  She is in first grade. 

You hear a lot that people wish they were the age of a kid again, but I never do.  I, like this very certain little first grader, just wanted to be grown up, and spent my whole adolescence looking forward to that freedom.   I can remember walking around my first semester of college and turning random corners, delighted that I was the only one who could choose them. 

And, since it is ten years later, I try to remember this so I won't find that I've taken my open exercising of free will for granted.  On my birthday, I talked to Isaac, and mentioned these ten years and my decade of adulthood.  He disagreed with measuring it like that, saying he felt like I've only really been grown up since I've left the Midwest, age 25.  That take on it is a bit more forgiving...whatever, it's all arbitrary anyway. 

Another part of this delight of choosing what's around me is finding art - things other people have made or thought about that I can infuse into my own.  Here are two from the past day:
-poetry:  Poem for my Daughter Disparaging the Gossamer Depictions of the Women of Certain Southern Texts by Adrian Blevins.
-music:  The Shepherd's Dog, new Iron and Wine album.  I'm not even going to waste wide world web space expounding on how ridiculous I got about this coming out on Tuesday.  I'm going to appeal to concision, instead, (ha!) and just say it was completely worth all of the anticipation I had...a gorgeous blend of folk and psychedelic rock.  I'm still dreaming about it. 

L:  collage and Iron and Wine lyrics from the song "Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car"

R:  drawing and Iron and Wine lyrics from the song "Peace Beneath the City" (which nicely contrasts the above-linked poem).