November 1–December 31, 2004 — Aging

Now I’m 23. Not by much, but by enough to commiserate.

It’s not far enough into my birthday to know how it’ll turn out. I don’t expect I’ll do anything I wouldn’t do on any other night, and that’s what I want. Still, if I start writing about it I might end up turning this into too lengthy a statement on loneliness. So I won’t.

I’m not sure how much else there is to say about being 23, though. Wasted years, feeling old, not getting carded anymore, hair in new places, feeling I really ought to commit to doing something: The same things, mostly.

So we can skip that part.

Lately I’ve been shopping to distract myself from the passing of time. But I just end up obsessing over that, too. I’ve been wondering about the etiquette of trying on shoes. If you try on shoes at a store that pays its employees mostly by commission and you don’t intend to buy the shoes, are you doing something unethical? Specifically if you’re only trying them on to buy a similar pair of shoes by the same company online for half the price? And going beyond that, if the person helping you asks if you’d like to put the shoes on hold and pressures you into it when you hesitate, should you feel guilty days later for not returning to buy shoes you never wanted in the first place?

Assuming the answer is yes, I think I’ve received my comeuppance already. I finally bought a winter coat, my first in three years. I wore it for the first time today, and I’m convinced the collar’s too tight and is cutting off some of the circulation to my head. (The rest of it is too baggy, but that’s more my fault than the coat’s.)

So I saved $50 on shoes and spent $125 on a coat that looks at least sort of alright, but that might cause me to pass out from wearing it.

I think those last few paragraphs were me trying to change the subject, to talk about shopping because it’s meant to be normal and doesn’t force me to look up “loneliness” in a thesaurus.

But there are other things, too. It’s tricky because most of what’s affected my life over the last month or two hasn’t really been my story to tell. I’m traveling alongside a lot of events, but none of them are happening to me, and writing about them wouldn’t be fair to the people they are happening to.

I’ve noticed how far away Jeff, Amy and Johnston are a lot these last few weeks. I feel like I’m tainted to most of the people I still know in Toronto. It’s harder to spend time with Matt and Andrew outside of work because there’s so much context built up with them at work. I’m feeling increasingly alienated in this city. But it’s not the city’s fault; I’ve just postponed adapting to the reality of most of the people I was closest to moving away.

Maybe now that I’m 23 I’ll work up some nerve and meet new people. I keep telling myself that, but I’ll never do it. I’ll probably just sigh a few times when I get home tonight, read for an hour and refuse to change anything. And then a few months from now I’ll write another journal entry about missing my friends and wanting to make new ones so I’m not relying so much on one or two people.

But if I changed I might have to think of something new to write about, and I don’t want to make more work for myself. My mind’s slowing down with age, after all.