I will indulge in a daylog here because it is not every day that I turn 30. Today is my 30th birthday, and despite the fact that it could be argued that the number is a construction, it still feels different for me. I even had a brief hallucinatory moment early this morning of seeing myself as an adult, of feeling the adulthood as a palpable force in my body, despite the fact that in many ways I perceive myself as a child. Along with turning 30, I am also going to finish graduate school, with a Master's Degree. I feel less proud of this than society perhaps would make it. I actually feel somewhat more proud of my status as an M-Noder.
But beyond that, I also have had an odd feeling for about a month, a feeling I refer to as liminal neoteny. Liminality, a word I was reintroduced to by William Gibson in the work Pattern Recognition, is the feeling of being on the cusp, in the midst of change. Neoteny is the biological term for an adult preserving juvenile traits. Many steps in evolution may have occurred because juveniles refused to turn into adults: it may be where vertebrates came from, when lancelet-like creatures refused to turn into tuniculates but continued to swim openly throughout the seas. I feel like a young lancelet, refusing the established order of settling down on a rock, reabsorbing my brain cells, and living the rest of my life by filter-feeding. Instead, I am trekking around in a world where my feelings and desires are not charted.
Which would be a great feeling, very liberating, besides I would like the feeling of some reality in my life. I guess part of this is that I am, like any sane person, afraid of death. I know that many people would give me the hip advice to live for today, but I don't even know what that means, because today doesn't seem terrible real for me. Other than stuffing myself with carbohydrates until I reach a liquid valium like coma, I don't know how to achieve oblivion, and whether I would enjoy it if I could. I have the feeling of being surrounded by unreality, zooming quickly to a greater unreality. I do the math: I am 30 years old, which means by the time I have doubled my years (and some parts of third grade seem to be hovering as my yesterday), I will be heading out of the active part of my life.
And I don't have any conclusion for this, this is just a report of how I am feeling as I reach this point of my life. It is perhaps a familiar story, but still one I want to write down in my own words.