I Want to be Her When I Grow Up

Trying to find ways of procrastinating before settling down to write my lecture for tomorrow (yes, this is one of those ways), I navigated my webpage to my friend's blog. She started this blog to keep her large family up to date with the goings on of her and her husband, now married about 3 years. She chronicles the events in her life, concerts, vacations, bike rides... etc. After catching up on her life from June, I couldn't help but feel jealous and sad about my life. I recognize that for the vast majority of my friends, our lives do not look like the incredible whirlwinds of glamor, adventure, love, perfection that modern-day movies suggest they should by age 27. I have 4 friends from college (not including me) in school and acquiring debt in this horrendous economy. Still, this friend took the most wonderful vacation, and seems to have an amazing life filled with sailing, cliff diving, and music festivals.

The truth is that I am very happy for her. I hear from her how hard she and her husband work, and I am glad that they do get to spend some of that hard earned money to do things that are enjoyable. But, then I begin to wonder. Here I sit, feeling what it is like to worry about money at the end of each and every month - hoping my lowly stipend can spread far enough to pay all my bills. I dream, like a little girl, about the prospect of how my life will change once I get a job and my boyfriend gets a job and we are ready to take our relationship to the next level.... I hope that I, too, will at some point be able to go out and spend forth and enjoy my hard earned money on vacations and trips and celebrations. But it all feels so far away. It feels difficult to feel like that could be an ever nearing possibility verses a dream that always remains just out of arm's reach.

I guess one of my fears is by the time I get out of school, I'm going to be very close to 28. If I want a family (and I haven't really decided), then I need to think about starting to save for the inevitable expense of child rearing (education, food, clothes, etc) and I won't take the time to enjoy life like my friend seems to be doing. Furthermore, unlike her, I will have then spent the last 6 years of my life worrying about each and every paycheck, scrounging away any penny I can to afford Christmas and birthday gifts. I also fear that by that time it will be so against my nature to actually spend money when I have a surplus verses squirreling it away to guarantee that I don't run out at the end of the year. So the question lingers: how will my life look in a year? I guess I need to keep in the back of my brain: I want to be like her when I grow up.