Several days after my 29th birthday, I find that I am doing an unreasonable amount of pouting.

I am pouting because I have failed to transform into various famous people.

Famous people I am not:

Amanda Palmer
Stephen Sondheim
Bernadette Peters
Poe (singer/songwriter type)
Audra McDonald
Angela Lansbury
Lynn Nottage
Timothy Near
Tony Kushner
Lanford Wilson
Christine Baranski
Carol Burnett
Amanda Palmer
Amanda Palmer
Amanda Palmer

The list continues in this vein for quite some time.

Interestingly, I don’t find myself particularly jealous of other prose fiction writers. Octavia Butler will always kick my ass up and down the page, but that’s okay. She’s just made of gold-plated awesome, and I’m fine with that.

If this were a serious post, I would meditate on how I’m not jealous of writers because I am one, because I know what that path looks like. I would recall how I was 22 when I first heard the Dresden Dolls and just about to graduate from college and living in a beautiful beach town that was drenched with sun, and the world seemed like that beach town, opening onto an ocean of possibility. And now that I am 29, choices have been made and options severed. And while I always knew I was never going to be Bernadette Peters, it was less clear then what I *would* be.

As this is not a serious post, I will end on this: Damn it, universe. It is completely unfair that I am not, currently, Amanda Palmer. That’s right, universe. I’m calling you out for being kind of a jerk.

Relatedly:

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/06/this-is-why-ill-never-be-adult.html