I have to believe I could outride him.

I had a moment this morning, in which I took stock of my pre-8am accomplishments, my clothes, and the sweating iced coffee in my hand, and realized that I’m so firmly seated on the shoulders of Adulthood, I didn’t even feel it lifting me into the air.  I dropped off my car at my mechanic (case in point: I have my own mechanic), and realized that, for the first time, I wouldn’t be waiting by the phone all day, dread eating my innards, for The Call From The Mechanic, informing me that my car’s eaten innards, ravaged by time and 14 Boston winters, will need a new ball joint/master clutch cylinder/fan belt/obscure car part girls aren’t supposed to know about.  The reason for this being: despite the tears, the nostalgia for high school carpools, the college road trips, and the late night parking lots teaching boys I had crushes on to drive a stick, I sold my first car last winter.  The car I dropped off this morning is 12 years younger, a veritable tot, a smug bastard, whose vacuumed interior and shiny Indigo Pearl finish is patiently awaiting an oil change.  It was purchased by large scary check from my own savings account, which in turn was filled up by the direct deposit of my own grown-up salary.  I’m new to this kind of calm, the calm that knows for a fact that my car is not only valuable, but can bounce back from a cold or a sniffle without my assuming it’ll be dead of heart disease in a week, bleeding internally from an aged crack in a creaking $300 tube I’ve never heard of.

***

AS I RAN to catch the bus to work, I looked down at my sandals slapping the sidewalk and realized, with a start, they were actually nice.  Everything I was wearing was nice–clean, fresh-smelling, nicely draped.  I was a vision in business casual and I didn’t even notice as I got dressed, standing in front of my wide-open closet, comparing shirts.  The oldest item on my body right now is my underwear, and even they’re remarkably unstretched, unstained.

I found myself seated next to two chittering hens, loudly filling the bus with their mutual outrage at having been defriended by a currently alcoholic former love interest, and pulled out my earphones–first in an attempt to drown them out, then, realizing my ipod was dead, all the better to listen intently to their conversation.  I remember how desperately I tried to understand the conversations that happened around me when I was living in Berlin and Florence, how tightly I screwed my ears in concentration to make sure I caught the important words, and I only realize now, how, like the billboards I tried to decipher like they were the Rosetta Stone, they’re as mundane in German as they are in English.  These conversations are so uniformly predicable.  From my soaring Adulthood Perch, I realize that I know exactly how conversations on the bus are going to pan out, their arch and cadence, their indignation, the light kiss kiss goodbye when the bus pulls up to its final destination.

***

THE OTHER NIGHT we ordered sushi and watched the premiere of Terra Nova, a bloated, empty, overproduced simulacrum pandering to our demographic: a generation raised on Jurassic Park (who, myself included, all secretly have strategies for outmaneuvering velociraptors, should it come to that).  The attractive-yet-awkward teenage boy was being enticed into mischief by the hot-tomboy, who took him by the hand and towards an empty waterfall, where she stripped down innocently-on-purpose and jumped into the water with a squeal that both mocked his anxiety and established her identity as the gutsy adventurer trollop.  Of course the first kiss would be in the water, once he jumped in after her and they swam towards each other, his ability to match her balls established.

“Wouldn’t it be great if life was actually like this?”  Adrianne said. “You lock eyes with someone across some prehistoric farmer’s market and you know immediately that they’re not only your love interest, but that you’ll be kissing in exactly two scenes?”

I took a slurp of miso soup.

“You know something?”  I said.  “I would have so much more respect for this show if a giant pterodactyl swooped in right now and ate them both.”