Nuts in Jars, Caramels and Adulthood

          "You don't have to get a job that makes others feel comfortable about what they perceive as your success. You don't have to explain what you plan to do with your life. You don't have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. You don't have to maintain an impeccable credit score. Anybody who expects you to do any of those things has no sense of history or economics or science or the arts.  You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give     it all you got. You have to find people who love you and try and love them back with the same truth.   But that's all."   
                                 –– Cheryl Strayed

            “The Fish Market,” she says when the clerk at the candy store asks my new roommate where she works.

            “I like fish,” he says.

            “Cool.” And, from a flame I don’t know why he ignited in the first place, she extinguishes the conversation into a wisp. 

            Until hearing “fish market,” I hadn’t been paying attention. While my roommate paid for her caramels, I’d stood beside her picking at what looked like a toothpaste stain on my shirt. This is “dry cleaning,” and not even the Koreans themselves can convince me that they’re not at least getting the fancy clothes damp. How can you really clean anything without at least getting it damp?

            Now I watch my roommate push her smudged glasses up the bridge of her nose and then the sleeves of her navy blue Salvation Army sweater up her forearms. She’s twenty-nine, one credit away from a bachelor’s in Chemistry, and cuts up fish for a living.  I’m twenty-seven with degrees in Comparative Literature and (I'm neither proud nor ashamed) Instability –– the latter earned after one decade of working almost forty jobs, living in fourteen apartments spread across six states, and dating dozens of wrong men resulting in five heartbreaks.      

            “And twelve caramels?” He asks.

            We nod.

            Are we adults?

            “No,” she says when I ask her on our walk back to the apartment. We’re sucking on the caramels.

            “Excellent sugar blankets for the teeth,” I say.

             She shrugs. Whatever.

            Growing up, we hear “mature,” “responsible” and “well–established” accompanying “adult” –– a word that, as a child, made me picture a bar of decorative soap and a roll of new quarters. I’ve heard people with at least one of the classic adulthood preconditions discuss dental expenses. Imprinted in their psyches are large sums they’ve paid for crowns and root canals. They’ll share these figures with friends when explaining why it’s taking them so long to pay off their credit cards  ––their original debts resulting from shenanigans like impulsive trips to Thailand and new motorcycles before they knew any better. To some, even college counts as a shenanigan. They’re now chipping away at student loans and saving money for mortgages. Whether or not they’re working weekends or golfing at the country club, they communicate this: at one point, they didn’t take shit seriously or consider their futures, and now they do.  

            I grew up in an affluent, highly–educated community in the suburbs. Of the grown–ups I know, the most “well–established” are, indeed, debt–free. They have houses with comfortable heating and cooling, degrees, titles, 401ks, tans from vacations they can afford, separate sets of utensils, an absurd number of pillows on beds, and lots of buttons they don’t know how to use. They store raw almonds and cashews in glass jars.  In the type of stable relationships where pregnancy is welcome, they use the word “we” to discuss experiences and plans. They take copious amounts of ibuprofen because they’re always hurting somewhere. They call Guatemalans to do their landscaping. They have multiple credit cards that they whip out and offer like pieces of gum. 

            My roommate has no credit card. I have no health insurance in Montana. We both have unpaid medical bills –– mine which I’m lucky enough not to receive anymore because I’ve confused the US postal service (and my mother) with so many address changes that I don't really get mail. I swallow, swipe my tongue across my upper and lower teeth as a substitute for brushing, and say, “What does it even mean to be an adult? Does it necessitate responsibility and emotional maturity, or is it based on financial stability?”

            As I walk, I’m picking at the toothpaste stain again –– a stain that isn’t mine because it’s a shirt that wasn’t always mine and also my first time wearing it. Before I claimed the thing, it hung on a fence in the park for a week. Also, if the stain is toothpaste, it can’t be mine because I’ve forgotten to brush my teeth this morning. And if the flaky white substance isn’t toothpaste, I don’t want to know what it is.

             “Well,” she says, “It would be redundant to place the word ‘responsible’ and ‘emotionally mature’ before ‘adult’ if ‘adult’ intrinsically meant such things, right? I know my share of financially stable grown–ups who can’t sit through difficult conversations without a cocktail. And then there are the unhappy housewives who curse the day they chose the left side of the bed instead of the right because, well, now they’re stuck there for life. As if having chosen the right side would make it all “better.” So they buy a bunch of shit they don’t need from Bed Bath and Beyond. 'Well–established' life doesn’t mean stable in every way.”

            “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe adulthood is an ongoing process of causing and resolving problems for yourself. And others.”    

            I don’t turn my head to look at the “Help Wanted” sign in a café window. I need a second job to accompany teaching thirteen yoga classes per week, but I’m bad at food service. That and work environments where jogging up the stairs is inappropriate. And so I’m pursuing a career as a writer beyond unpaid publications in journals. To get there, I’m willing to do anything involving my language skills. Data entry counts (I can type 97 words per minute and even get a rush doing it). I have two interviews next week. Anyhow, I think it’s time –– through my writing –– to start making enough money to buy raw nuts in bulk and then to store them in glass jars. Screw the buttons and pillows and marriage. Out of all the presumed qualities of a “well–established” adult, the jarred–nuts sound most appealing. And the 401K of course. Not that I know what this means other than that you have enough money to purchase raw almonds and cashews in bulk, which means you don’t eat them all on your way home and they make it into the jars.  If you’re someone like me who can’t save snacks for later, this would be a feat. (If being able to save snacks was a characteristic of adulthood, by the way, I’m a child).  

            As we walk up our quiet street, I share the next thing on my mind: “In bed, he can’t fall asleep when I read even if it’s with a flashlight, but I can’t fall asleep unless I read in bed. This is one of our only conflicts in addition to the insecurity I sometimes project about how he’s financially stable, and I’m not yet. I get defensive thinking he’s judging me and fear appearing reliant upon him and him resenting me because he paid for my snack or something. But we love each other, and our love is independent of money. I hope it can stay that way."
          "Makes sense," she says, unwrapping another caramel.
          "I mean, we spend most of our free time hiking and cooking together at low cost, but I have to be ego-less enough to ask him to spot me for things we do and eat together that I wouldn't otherwise because of cost. Like going to The Hot Springs or movies.  I'm confident that a steady income breeds independence in many ways and am working towards the whole 'financial freedom' thing. I want and will be able to consistently afford good food and social activities like weekend climbing trips. But, you know, I’m satisfied that my current happiness in life is at least free from money . . . "

            “Amen,” she says and opens the door to our basement apartment.

            Now we re-join the Hobo spiders, which my roommate spends time trapping in jars when she isn’t working at The Fish Market. After my encounter with one of the large, gangly–legged brown arachnids on move-in day, she’d instructed me to “never leave clothes on the floor; they like to hide in clothes.” This was of course after I’d placed every clothing article on the floor.  Unafraid of the spiders after two years of living with them, she’d shaken out my clothes down to the last sock while I pranced around the room like a grasshopper  –– a much friendlier bug. 

             “If they’re hiding,” she’d said, “They’ll just sort of awkwardly tumble out when you shake the clothes. They can’t crawl up very well, so you don’t have to worry about them in your bed or anything.”

            Oh good. Later though, while she’s bathing, one falls from the ceiling onto her face. She screams. Then I’m worrying about them on my face, which is even worse than in the bed because, in the bed, you at least have a shot of feeling them on your legs before they reach your face. It’s August, and we have no air conditioning, but we close all the apartment windows anyway. It’s an uncomfortable, imperfect and complex situation –– just like, well, adulthood as we sift through contrast identifying what we want and don't and why. As we cultivate and practice our values. And maybe it is my expertise in Instability –– being uncomfortable and taking risks ––  that is stabilizing me in my values. Maybe I'm not so unstable after all.    

            In this limited and tangential discussion of adulthood, there can be no conclusions –– only greater thought. (And maybe "greater thought" is an ideal with which to engage as we age). So can any grown-up be simultaneously and always responsible, mature, and well–established? I don’t think so. Maybe these qualities are subjective and often related but aren’t necessarily contingent upon one another. For example, to me, recycling is a reflection of responsibility and maturity, but plenty of financially stable grown-ups are wasteful consumers.  In our culture, how much we consume reflects our success in the “adult world.” The more stuff we have, the more “successful” and “happier” we must be. 

            What I do know: whether we work at a fish market or as the CEO of a financial company, we as grown-ups are confronted daily with challenges, situations and choices to make that determine our relationships both with natural resources and others. If you recognize that these relationships matter for better or for worse, and if you are aware of yourself as a component of a bigger picture, than I think you’re already successful  . . . ! Now go eat some caramels.