There are events that happen in my friends lives that make me question my own. It goes like this. My friend's life falls apart,I wonder why my own has not and when it will. My friend's life comes together, I wonder why my own has not and when it will.
I wonder when I will stop weighing my own life against my friends and judge it for its own merit. I wonder how my friends weight my life against theirs. I wonder if I am the only one playing this game and if I have just lost a few friends by mentioning it.
It goes like this.
Friend A, whose name happens to start with A, travels to a foreign land to follow his studies and continue to make his way towards his PhD in a field he is very passionate about, despite the few dips he's taken into the what-does-it-all-mean pool, minor detours where he wondered why he was wearing the same sweater since freshman year and living with three guys while his working friends were three pairs of shoes past Doc Martins and choosing between buying a place in the city or the suburbs. Passionate friend A is also a bitter intellectual type who has given me layered philosophical arguments why marriage and children are self-serving, flimsy constructs of a deterioriating modern world. Wanting marriage and children puts you in the same class of people going door-to-door to sell the creation theory as scientific fact. Or something like that. Utterly deplorable.
Friend A emails me last week. He's in love with a woman who has been married and has triplets. He has never sounded more ecstatic. I wonder where the bitter intellectual has fled to, or if he has been fed to the triplets or swallowed by the diaper genie. The same man who spouted marxist theory and spit on the notion of children now spends his foreign land Saturday mornings shopping for strollers. He's marrying this one and, you guessed it, filling a house with more bambinos. Praise Jesus, Adam, Eve, Mary and Joseph.
Now, how come my bitter intellectual is still floating on the surface, doing a smooth backstroke while squirting a happy, fountain-like stream of water from its mouth?
Friend B emails me. She has left the woman she has been living with for the past four years. She left a relationship that in makes my relationships feel inadequate and immature in comparison. I used to marvel at her self-assuredness, how she spoke of the relationship as if it were a known, a given. Being with her girlfriend was like driving to the beach and being absolutely certain that the ocean would be curling and hushing itself at the other end of the sand. There just wasn't any question, and now there is nothing left.
This is why my bitter intellectual is not only floating and swimming, but approaching olympic strength. Or maybe it has just turned thirty.
