Days of Future Past

As you all know, I'm a very forward-thinking gal, and so of course I'm already thinking about spring break---only a month away, so you can't be too prepared. I'm spending some time back in Ktown with the family, of course, which is what single people do on vacations when all their friends are married or fully employed. But each visit makes me think of the possibility of moving back there, which seems to have so many objective postives and subjective negatives that I wonder if I'm just being silly. As Carrie Bradshaw would say: I had to wonder... Is there a point where your future begins to look like your past? Seriously. Many people I know do fun stuff when they're younger but when "settle-down" time comes (whenever that may be) they go back & emulate the previous generation in the exact same crap we all said we'd never do like our parents did. Take careers, for example: we all believed we'd never work jobs we hated just for $$ reasons, and a ton of people I know do just that. I hated school for some of the same things I've hated about several places I worked: pettiness in co-workers, nonsensical and ineffective rules, paperwork/homework to fill the time, et cetera, ad infinitum. Same thing goes for the way we raise the next generation: we say "I'll never do that to my kids; I'll be different," and we end up making most of the same mistakes our parents made with a few thrown into the cocktail of psychic f-ups. Anyway, that's my little rant on why my life looks so little like that of my parents and their entire generation when they were 30. I think I want to change careers every 8 or 10 years, never settle down per se, and confound the conventional education/marriage/kids/retirement process. I was so grown-up acting as a child that now I just want to start being more & more silly as the years go on. Feel free to join me in living life backwards.