november 24, 2000. Today is my mom's 47th birthday. I didn't even send a card. Boy, do I ever suck. I'm living a cliché. No really, I am. I mean, it's a cliché that one morning you will wake up and realize that you are an adult. No going back. That was this morning, only the thought was that I'm not a kid any more. Extended adolescence has been awfully sweet to me. In my early 20's, I still felt like I was 17. It wasn't an affectation; it was the sense I had of myself. It was the way my inner picture was constructed. For the last year or so, I've lost that certainty. Inside I don't know what I should look like, how old I should be, if I'm single or taken, or even how long my hair is. When I wake up in the morning, sometimes it takes me couple of minutes to reboot my personality. All of which is to say, this morning I woke up. My head hurt. My stomach hurt. I have about 10 reading journals to mark this weekend and most of my time is taken up with projecting an aura of detached professionalism in order to get some respect from teenagers. The difference between them & me is not an unimportant coffee break of university education - we are separated by a genuine gulf. I'm not a student anymore. I can't sit in the back & daydream through a boring movie. I can't smell pot without snapping to attention & trying to figure out the culprit. My own lameness astounds me. This change is so damn profound. For a while I thought that the shift was superficial. This year has been pretty insular and boring on the whole, but I chalked that up our social isolation. We stay in on school nights without a thought to the alternatives. We can't afford to shop or eat out on more than an occasional evening. Our weekends are full of housework, grocery shopping and quiet reading/video game playing. We're not even drinking beer around the house anymore - it's lost its customary excitement. I can't even work up a righteous anger about these things. Maybe that's because I can't see any alternatives right now. But even if we were still in Toronto, our friends would just be a smokescreen to the real situation. For all my years of frenetic adolescence, I'm an adult now. And there's not a damn thing I can do about it. It would become me to capitulate gracefully, I know. Even Moe Berg has written a book. Still. Give me a little time to get used to it. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go pick up my voter registration card. Suffrage is one of those things I have to pay attention to now. sometimes my head hurts and sometimes my stomach hurts and I guess that it won't be long before I'm sitting in a room of people who's necks and backs are aching, whose sight and hearing's failing who just can't seem to get it up. i can't take any more illicit drugs, i can't afford any artificial joy. i'd sure look like a fool dead in a ditch somewhere with a mind full of chemicals like some cheese-eating high school boy... (for the full text of my life, consult the pursuit of happiness. thank you.)