Feeling grown up

So lately I've started to feel more and more grown up. I don't think it really has all that much to do with the fact that my thirtieth birthday is right around the corner. I don't really feel that the fact that I just started a tenure track faculty position is adding to the feelings of getting older. Sadly, it seems to be all the stuff I recently got.

See with the move to SoCal and the new job I now have both income (or will shortly) and a need for a few things that I just couldn't get in the past. So I seem to have procured a lot more material goods in a very short time, the last three days to be exact. In that time I managed to get a car and a computer for the first time in my life. Somehow this finally makes me feel as though I'm grown up. I suppose it's because I always figured that I would finally get a car when I "grow up" so that's really the final stamp on my aging, though the increasing number of grey hairs is a good daily reminder.

Then of course there is the apartment. This places feels nothing like the apartments I've had since I started going to university. It's spacious, huge to be exact, with a wonderfully vaulted ceiling in the living room. Add to that a spare bedroom and a second full bathroom and I really don't feel like a kid any more. Plus this really isn't a neighbourghood that students would live in; the place is so upscale you don't separate your recyclables from your trash, they do that for you. And no, I'm not kidding, that's what we were told at the rental office.

So these things just add up to destroy the mental image of myself as a 22 year old kid. I guess I'll just have to roll with it, I'm going to be get older despite everything I do so I may as well enjoy it. And at least I've already started to get comments to the effect of "Wow, you look so young to be a prof." So that should help ease the transition from student to adult. After all, are you really allowed to consider yourself a student when you haven't been in a class (only to learn) in over five years? I didn't think so...damn you cruel world and your "reality".