It's a funny age, nineteen. It's like you're hanging in limbo- a legal adult but still technically a teenager. Not to mention nothing cool happens when you turn nineteen. The last three years have accustomed me to reaching milestones like driving or watching R movies without my parents (this doesn't seem too exciting but my parents were very... enthusiastic... about age ratings and following them. I've ruined my fair share of pre-teen slumber parties because the movie selected was PG-13 and I a mere 12). Eighteen opens the door for a flurry of opportunities to make poor decisions; buy cigarettes, gamble, vote for politicians based on how cool their name sounds and whose commercials annoyed you less. And the years to follow are pretty exciting, too. Twenty is a definitive end to childhood and young adulthood. Your feet have walked this earth for two full decades, a full score if we're being pretentious. And 21 is... well everyone knows what 21 is. And there sits nineteen, smushed between five years of exciting achievements; stuff you get just for breathing everyday.
But for some reason I'm very excited about nineteen-- more exited than I was for the others. It seems like a year of possibility. The age itself doesn't give you anything, so I feel as if I have the personal obligation to make something cool happen this year all on my own. There's one really nice thing about having a birthday this close to the new year, and that's that you can pretend the first 10 days of the new year don't actually count and your new year starts when your life actually began. This leaves ample time to finish the Christmas cookies and sit around doing nothing before you begin your New Year's resolution of working out and eating healthier. However, all this free time sitting around doing nothing serves the double purpose of having a lot of time to think about things, which leads to hoping for things that the year might bring.
For as long as I can remember my parents have played classic rock for my sister and I. I actually think it was less for us than it just happened to be the music they liked, but it made an impact on us. Not only do we like the songs we grew up listening to, but we have discovered other oldies that might not have been introduced to us via parents. Now, this being said, some think that Elvis is the King. I think it's Billy Joel. If you know me well, you know I have an undying passion for Queen, and Mr. Joel is rapidly approaching entrance to the pedestal I hold them on. I have listened to both Queen's and Billy Joel's greatest hits albums so many times I might have broken iTunes and/or Spotify. There's something about the classics-- there's a reason why they're classics after all. They represent everything that rock & roll is supposed to be. You can listen to their songs and hear the heartbeat of an era; everything it wanted or dreamed of-- what it stood for. If you listen to popular music now, you would think the only thing we're capable of thinking about is big butts and boys.
So anyway, Billy Joel is the epitome of classic rock (to me, you can argue if you want but I won't care). But until recently I had never heard, or at least not many times, one of his songs. Then a few weeks ago it started to play as the back song to a scene in 13 going on 30 (judge me, please, I'm begging). Vienna. And as I listened, the hairs stood up on my neck, because it spoke to me and everything I had decided about my 19th year.
I had decided I wanted to be a writer. And not just one who dreams of being published but ends up washed up in her mother's basement sad and lonely and a 'broken artist'. I want to be published. I want to take from the inspiration I draw from other authors and dish out some of my own. Maybe there's a starry-eyed kid riding her bike to the library every other day in the summer just to get out more books that I can help by putting myself out there a little. I was told in a high school english class that Bukowski was inspired by Kafka. He even wrote a poem about it. And it made me think about how one person can inspire so many, and if we apply the phone-tree effect, there could be even more. It might be a stretch, but no Kafka could have meant no Bukowski, and then where would we be? Now don't get me wrong, I am in no way comparing myself to either of their genius, but sometimes I wonder if my writing could inspire the next great author to finally ink something. Vienna spoke to me and I'm not really sure why because I'm pretty sure the message I took from is the opposite of what Billy is trying to say.
Slow down you crazy child, you're so ambitious for a juvenile but then if you're so smart then tell me why are you still so afraid. Where's the fire what's the hurry about? You better cool it down before you burn it out. You've got so mush to do and only so may hours in a day. But you know that when the truth gets told that you can get what you want or you can just get old.
There it is. "You can either get what you want or you can just get old". I think I finally realized, after a lifetime of people telling me life is short and I shouldn't waste it, that life is actually extremely short and it's terribly easy to glide through and never accomplish what you intended to or leave a legacy when you go. It felt like I started high school a year ago and now I'm already knee deep in my second semester of college. If I'm going to accomplish the things I want to, I need to start working towards them now. And I need to work hard, because I don't take rejection well and there is an unhealthy amount of it waiting for me if I go down this career path without working my ass off to make anything I write the absolute best it can be.
This was originally going to be an entry about my bucket list for 19 and 2015 and what not, but that's boring. And if there's one type of author that never gets published, it's the one that plays it safe. I'm done being scared to let people read what I write out of fear of not being good enough, or fear that they won't like it (haters gonna hate, am I right?). I'm done waiting for God to interfere and place me in the lap of a publisher. I'm done wishing my life was somehow different and not doing anything about it. It only took me 19 years to get here, but I'm finally ready to take advantage of my time, not waste it away, and somehow make my mark.
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