Doesn't remind me

I've been really bad at both updating this and my real-life-pen-and-paper journal for the past month or so. I meant to post about my trip to California but haven't. I'll get around to it.

It's getting to be that time of year again. The humidity that hangs over New York is being blown out to sea, and soon the serene crispness of autumn will blow through the city. It'll be the high holidays, and my birthday, a time to take stock. These past five years I've changed so much that I'm almost unrecognizable to myself and yet there are still things I can't change.
I went to a show tonight at a bar in Williamsburg. Everyone there seemed to be exactly my age. Slowly sipping our beers, no whispering about fake IDs or hastly downing rum and cokes. Everybody clapped politely and rocked gently to the music. There was no pushing and shoving, and we would move out of the way quickly and quietly to let people pass. Whispered apologies were exhanged if the maneuvers did not go smoothly. It was genteel, and almost, even...mature. At one point, I found my self standing next to the the oldest person in the room. Late thirities, he'd pushed his way across the room and somehow finagled a bar stool. He carried a nervousness about him and seemed to take up twice the space of anyone else there. I wondered how many more years of youthfulness I had to be seen in places like this.
I'd been planning on going to grad school next fall. It seemed like the logical next step. It'd be a way to get out of the working world and back into the sleepy arms of academia. But I realized that short of buying stationery, I have no interest in going back to school. Everyone I've told my plans to has made a face, and told me that they can't see me doing that. I really can't either.
So all this indecision had made me fairly cranky. I've been particularly judgemental lately. All around me I see examples of how I don't want to live, and very few of how I do.