Frenemies and the curious- my worldly adventures.

My $0.02 on Being 20-Something

You know, being a 22 year-old might be the worst age… ever. Some reasons why:

1. You’ve just graduated from college, and you are jobless. Mom keeps screaming ‘I told you so’ and your decision to study Liberal Arts is starting to blur the line between that mazarati and reality.. If you do have a job, skip to #3.
2. Because you’re jobless and clueless- it is blood-boiling to have everyone and their Uncle Joe ask you, “So what are you up to nowadays?” And you just want to go 007 on their nosy asses and scream “I graduated 8 months ago and I am FUCKING FINE!!!!!!”. Then you slowly collect yourself and go back to the hole that is a small cubby next to your parents’ room.
3. No matter how hot and sexy you thought you were/is/are - you’re now sitting at the bottom of this corporate pit staring up at all the sharks in your company ready to hound you for being too young, too inexperienced, and too hot. It’s a lose-lose situation and no one’s gonna give you 2 seconds of their time cuz you’re the noob.
4. You’re looking down the barrel of age and fine lines and wrinkles. Sure it was cool when you turned 21 and had an 8 pack of muscle- but now you realize its only going to get worse from here. As much as people like to call all that weird stuff thats happening to your face/body/ass/thighs/stomach “aging gracefully”, it just makes your body sound like a punching bag for life to beat up Chris Brown style.  Heads up: Your 23rd birthday is going to be uneventful. And your 25th birthday is just going to be embarrassing. You can’t even think about menopause because you used to think it only existed in a sort of Hell where stretch marks and double chins lived…
5. WHERE THE F*** DID MY CURVES AND BOOTY GO?! What is this metabolism shit I have to hear about now? Beer and vodka have calories??!!!!!!!! What’s cholesterol?

I thought I’d start this article with the obvious. You can HOLLA @ me if I missed any other depressing fact of being a young 20-something. Take it from an ex-22 year old who was also formerly known as Don’t-Mention-Real-Life-To-Her-Face; there is a light at the end of this bleak, stuffy, stinky tunnel.

Here’s why:

1. You’ll never be 22 again. This might sound obvious, but hear me out. One day, your company is going to ask a new 22 year old to come in and give their ‘fresh’ POV. And you’ll be that old geezer in the back wishing you were 22 and still considered the cool new thang.
2. Your new job will be enriching beyond measure. 1) The company will be fairly forgiving because of your lack of experience, and 2) because you’re 22, you are allowed (and even encouraged) to make mistakes and LEARN. You can’t do that at 45, where making “mistakes” and “learning” is also referred to as disappointing stock performance or the board forcing you to terminate.
3. You realize everything is going to be OK. Its OK if you started your career at 27. Its OK that you worked at Nordstrom. Its OK you spent 3 years tutoring in Korea, South Africa, and Brazil. Because in the end, its going to be OK. Your 20’s are the only time you can do this freely without blame. Side commentary: In your 20’s, this hippie loving, freedom fighting attitude is SO COOL, but just get your shit together by the time your 30’s come around or you’re really screwed.
4. One day you’ll be 30-something with a house payment and screaming children. And then you’ll really wish you were still that 20-something jumping through the hoops of youth.
5. Your body was great when you were 18. But don’t even spend a second on it cuz you won’t need to be dressing like a hooch during your company’s corporate Christmas party.

And to finish this article, I’ll recall one of my more finer moments of being a 22 year old. I work for a software company and am often surrounded by middle aged men and women who I deeply admire and aspire to be like. I was complaining about all the vices of being a young kid in this industry when a 50-something colleague told me, “You’re so lucky to be youthful and uninhibited by scars of the past. You can get up and leave, and no one would blame you for it.”

That’s only true when you’re 20 something so endulge. You can make mistakes and then later blame everything on your 20’s and everyone will be like AW YEAH and not judge you for it.

To FINISH finally- the first photo is of me in college, and some odd years later being 20-something and loving this life I lead. Be proud of how you change and why you change.

Figure 1) In my sorority house:

Figure 2) At Microsoft’s World Partner Conference in Toronto, Canada:

Why did the chicken cross the road?

• Plato: For the greater good.
• Karl Marx: It was a historical inevitability.
• Machiavelli: So that its subjects will view it with admiration, as a chicken which has the daring and courage to boldly cross the road, but also with fear, for whom among them has the strength to contend with such a paragon of avian virtue? In such a manner is the princely chicken's dominion maintained.
• Hippocrates: Because of an excess of light pink gooey stuff in its pancreas.
• Jacques Derrida: Any number of contending discourses may be discovered within the act of the chicken crossing the road, and each interpretation is equally valid as the authorial intent can never be discerned, because structuralism is DEAD, DAMMIT, DEAD!
• Thomas de Torquemada: Give me ten minutes with the chicken and I'll find out.
• Timothy Leary: Because that's the only kind of trip the Establishment would let it take.
• Douglas Adams: Forty-two.
• Nietzsche: Because if you gaze too long across the Road, the Road gazes also across you.
• Oliver North: National Security was at stake.
• B.F. Skinner: Because the external influences which had pervaded its sensorium from birth had caused it to develop in such a fashion that it would tend to cross roads, even while believing these actions to be of its own free will.
• Carl Jung: The confluence of events in the cultural gestalt necessitated that individual chickens cross roads at this historical juncture, and therefore synchronicitously brought such occurrences into being.
• Jean-Paul Sartre: In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the chicken found it necessary to cross the road.
• Ludwig Wittgenstein: The possibility of "crossing" was encoded into the objects "chicken" and "road", and circumstances came into being which caused the actualization of this potential occurrence.
• Albert Einstein: Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the chicken depends upon your frame of reference.
• Aristotle: To actualize its potential.
• Buddha: If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-nature.
• Howard Cosell: It may very well have been one of the most astonishing events to grace the annals of history. An historic, unprecedented avian biped with the temerity to attempt such an herculean achievement formerly relegated to homo sapien pedestrians is truly a remarkable occurence.
• Salvador Dali: The Fish.
• Darwin: It was the logical next step after coming down from the trees.
• Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death.
• Epicurus: For fun.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson: It didn't cross the road; it transcended it.
• Johann von Goethe: The eternal hen-principle made it do it.
• Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain.
• Werner Heisenberg: We are not sure which side of the road the chicken was on, but it was moving very fast.
• David Hume: Out of custom and habit.
• Jack Nicholson: 'Cause it [censored] wanted to. That's the [censored] reason.
• Pyrrho the Skeptic: What road?
• Ronald Reagan: I forget.
• John Sununu: The Air Force was only too happy to provide the transportation, so quite understandably the chicken availed himself of the opportunity.
• The Sphinx: You tell me.
• Mr. T.: If you saw me coming you'd cross the road too!
• Henry David Thoreau: To live deliberately ... and suck all the marrow out of life.
• Mark Twain: The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.
• Molly Yard: It was a hen!
• Zeno of Elea: To prove it could never reach the other side.
• Chaucer: So priketh hem nature in hir corages.
• Wordsworth: To wander lonely as a cloud.
• The Godfather: I didn't want its mother to see it like that.
• Keats: Philosophy will clip a chicken's wings.
• Blake: To see heaven in a wild fowl.
• Othello: Jealousy.
• Dr. Johnson: Sir, had you known the Chicken for as long as I have, you would not so readily enquire, but feel rather the Need to resist such a public Display of your own lamentable and incorrigible Ignorance.
• Mrs. Thatcher: This chicken's not for turning.
• Supreme Soviet: There has never been a chicken in this photograph.
• Oscar Wilde: Why, indeed? One's social engagements whilst in town ought never expose one to such barbarous inconvenience - although, perhaps, if one must cross a road, one may do far worse than to cross it as the chicken in question.
• Kafka: Hardly the most urgent enquiry to make of a low-grade insurance clerk who woke up that morning as a hen.
• Swift: It is, of course, inevitable that such a loathsome, filth-ridden and degraded creature as Man should assume to question the actions of one in all respects his superior.
• Macbeth: To have turned back were as tedious as to go o'er.
• Whitehead: Clearly, having fallen victim to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
• Freud: An die andere Seite zu kommen. (Much laughter.)
• Hamlet: That is not the question.
• Donne: It crosseth for thee.
• Pope: It was mimicking my Lord Hervey.
• Constable: To get a better view.
• Yeats: She was following the Faeries that sang to her to come away with them from the dull, bucolic comfort of the farmyard to the waters and the wild.
• Shelley: 'Tis a metaphor for the pursuits of man: though 'twas deemed an extraordinary occurrence at the time, still it brought little to bear on the great scheme of time and history, and was ultimately fruitless and forgotten.
• Tolkien: Chickens are respectable folk, and well thought of. They never go on any adventures or do anything unexpected. One fine spring day, as the chicken wandered contentedly around the farmyard, clucking and pecking and enjoying herself immensely, there appeared a Wizard and thirteen Dwarves who were in need of a chicken to share in their adventure. Reluctantly she joined their party, and with them crossed the road into the great Unknown, muttering about how rude the Dwarves were to take her away on such short notice, without even giving her time to brush her feathers or fetch her hat.
• Hussie: He didn't, he died four pages after being introduced.

Anonymous asked: Dear Daisy, how do you keep so happy, carefree, and on top of it all? I'm so very jealous of your je ne sais quois! Please do write back.

Dear anonymous, I think this comment is so very flattering but most of all I think you might be slightly delusional. I don’t think I’m one to give other people advice on how to live their lives, because I don’t think I even know how to live mine.

But I will say that I have been truly blessed. I didn’t choose this life I was born into, but I always attempt to make it worth while for the sacrifices of my parents. There will always be others  who succeed in impossible predicaments I could never imagine. 

I’m miserable half the time thinking about life. But I am thankful for all the good will that people have shown me in such a short time. The best way to be happy is to be honest and whole with yourself. Kill me for the cliche, but I don’t think a lot of people can look at themselves straight because we’re all afraid of a little honesty.

And to conclude- I don’t know who I am. I can barely put on matching socks in the morning. But actually, it is not important to know who you are because that changes sporadically- what time it is, what the weather’s like, who you’re with. It is more important to know what you are not no matter the time or day. Thus, I don’t know what parts of me I’ll find in the corners of the world but I do know the type of person I won’t allow myself to become. And I make a conscious effort of not turning into someone I could not be not proud of.