Preachings of a 20-something...

On my way to work today, I saw an older man in a flashy red sports car. I always thought the whole buying a little red sports car during a mid-life crisis was one of those myths…you know, the kind that well-meaning aunts tell you, like when they warn you of the dangers of swallowing fruit-pits: “You don’t want a little tree growing in your belly, now do you?” (that one had me scared for years I tell you)
It got me thinking though, what exactly IS a mid-life crisis?
Sociologist Daniel Shek, in a 1996 study, defined (no, I am not making this up) a mid-life crisis as the desire to "reappraise previous life structures with an eye to making revisions while there is still time."…In that way, it is not momentary madness but rather, a moment of sudden clarity. The moment you realize…time is running out. I don't know about you, but that seems pretty scary to me.
Having just gone through a mini-crisis in my life (a quarter life crisis?) I have had some experience. As fresh graduates (can I still use that term 9 months later?) we often linger in a stage of constant indecision and ambivalence. After spending 4 (or 4 and 1/2) solid years at school doing everything with the main aim of graduating, I found myself at a thoroughly unclimatic and undramatic culmination to school-life. "That's it?' I wondered, tehtering on the cusp of entering the so-called "real world."
Maybe I had missed out on my epiphany, I thought. I still hadn't quite figured out "what to do with my life," so how could I be graduating already?

I moved back home and spent a few months living happily 'lost in transition,' the transition between full-time college student and full-time working woman.

It was good for the first few months...my most arduous task involved my movement out of bed and onto the couch. I loved it - catching up on months of trashy daytime television, having good food readily prepared (and not having to worry how it got there), clean clothes (and no need to do laundry myself)...I was surprisingly complacent living in limbo.

"Just waiting for my life to begin," I would laughing tell friends who would check in about my future job (and generally, life) prospects.

And therein lay my biggest problem - my crisis waiting to happen.

This is it guys, your life. You can't just sit around waiting for shit to happen - you have to make it happen. Sorry to go all Oprah on you. But this is my Miranda moment - I've seen the light and feel the need to spread the gospel. The way I see it, you can continue being passive about the things that are happening to you or you can just make the decisions you need to make and really start living your life.