For most of the last week, Andrew and I have been in Austin, Texas to celebrate the wedding of one of my dear high school girlfriends. It was a beautiful wedding, and Andrew and I had a great time experiencing the "weird" of Austin, eating cupcakes from a a trailer, breakfast tacos from the world's most beautiful grocery store, and bbq in a gas station all while enjoying the company of our good friends. Everything was perfect (save the awfully dry plane/hotel air that wreaked havoc on my sinuses) about the week of vacation we had together.
The bride was the last of my high school group of friends to get married, so it was cause for extra celebration. If we were typical for women from the same upbringing in a small Midwestern town, I don't think this fact would be all that surprising, but we're a pretty a-typical group. In college, I couldn't picture any of us married. We were hard studying, hard partying, liberal feminists who had much bigger dreams than a white picket fence and an Amana refrigerator. We bonded over Sex and the City and then lived it out, college-style, over summers home as we all camped out in the apartment of the friend who went to the university closest to home. We had crazy adventures, and as I re-capped some of these to Andrew as we drove to the airport in a snowstorm on Wednesday night, I realized for the first time that we were also ridiculously lucky that none of us were ever hospitalized or jailed. At the time, I just thought we were too good and too invincible.
When the first of us got married just a couple months after graduation, I was admittedly terrified. None of us were really the marrying type when we first came together as a clique after high school, and I didn't think the four years of college had changed us really all that much.
Also, Andrew and I had started dating just a few weeks after this friend called to say she was engaged, so when we watched her walking down the aisle a year later, Andrew and I knew we were headed in roughly the same direction (though it was a little too soon to really be able to comprehend it). For a few years, my friend and her husband were the only people Andrew and I knew who were our age and married but weren't in a mad rush to have our parents' lifestyle. It was refreshing, and knowing them probably sped up our own trip to the altar.
Of these five women whom I'm still close to (myself included), we boast some pretty impressive stats - which, in my opinion, also made all five of us skipping down the aisle in the last five years a little less likely: among us, we hold 5 undergraduate degrees (and a semester of medical school), 4 Master's degrees and 1 currently in graduate school; we live in 5 different states - only one lives in the state of our hometown, and since she lives in Chicago, that doesn't really count; we all love to travel - all been to Europe - 3 of us studied abroad, one lived there while in the military; we all hold full time jobs, mostly in the fields that we studied. We all are incredibly passionate about the fields that we studied, and honestly, the crowd is pretty career driven.
And now we all wear two rings on our left hand ring finger and have a partner to drag with us on our vacations (too see each other, of course). I'm very proud of the women my friends have become, and frankly, I've been having a hard time shaking off those little pangs of sadness that I don't see them more often. We have loose plans for a new trip together though, and it sounds as though in a few years, the two who have migrated the farthest will wind up in the same vicinity, which will make visits that much easier.
But while I miss my friends immensely, I also have a hard time being around them sometimes. What I didn't notice as clearly when we were in college is that we're all very different. And, when we get together, sometimes I feel a bit more of the black sheep than I ever did back then. Each of them have flourished in environments that are very different than where we grew up. They are, in essence, a little bad-ass either by virtue of job title or lifestyle or both. All of them live in areas where tourism is bustling - so regular ol people want to visit the places where my friends actually live. And while I love where I live and it's not like we don't have tourism, no one really takes a flight here for a little vacation. I can't help it, maybe it's just in my nature - but the entire time I'm around my friends, I compare myself in my head. And I can't help but feel a little self-conscious. Okay, a lot self-conscious. I feel like I didn't "grow up" enough and that I'm still too small-town.
Andrew and I usually end up talking about it most of the way home. He reminds me that we make choices. My friends' lifestyles would drive me crazy because I'm just programmed in a different way. That we're happy.
And we are happy. I know this because I was very unhappy in grad school and for the first few months of our marriage (not because of Andrew, obviously!). When we moved here and thus had time together, when I found work I enjoyed and cared about, and when we moved into our house and decided that this is where we want to grow, I realized that for the first time in my life, I wasn't looking forward to anything - I was just living. And that made me happy.
It's hard articulate that though when I get to see my old friends, because sometimes I think everything that comes out of my mouth just sounds small and insignificant. I see my life as exhilarating and fun and exciting, but when I'm around my "city" friends, I see everything through a different lens, because their versions of exhilarating and fun seem so different than mine.
But I am just soooo not city. It's taken me awhile to come to terms with this, because I really like cities. I like art and I like music and I like shopping and I like food, and cities are full of all these things. But as frustrating as it is for me to admit this, I like nature, and open space and 15 minute commutes, and affordable living more. I like people, but I don't like too many. I don't like walking like I'm in a hurry unless I'm really in a hurry. And I really, really hate traffic. When I'm around my cosmopolitan friends (what happened to the days where we just drank cosmos?), I am constantly asking myself, "wait a second, why don't I want to be like them? Is there something wrong with me?"
We returned this afternoon just in time for me to attend a class that I'm taking at the art museum (did I mention I like affordable museum memberships, too?) about Frank Lloyd Wright architecture. The lecturer said, "Frank Lloyd Wright believed that cities embodied progress but were also the greatest barriers to progress." Apparently, FLW also said cities were built by greed, and renting meant that an individual can't control his or her own destiny, so he was clearly not a fan of the city lifestyle -and while I wouldn't take it that far, but I think to some extent, these are the pangs of emotion that I feel when I'm visiting a larger city. There is so much to do there and I love visiting - but I know that if my life was in a city, I'd be constantly frustrated because there is so much to do and not enough time or money to experience it all.
While I loved a week of city life and talking about city life with my worldly girlfriends, I was aching to come home today. We unpacked our bags and patted our kitties (who we'd missed immensely) and returned to the (small) city life as we know it. As much as I love travel and experiencing new, big, and exciting places, there is just no better feeling than the familiarity of home.
Well, that and sleeping to the hum of the humidifier.
