Great Balls of Fire

May I just say, I think the day just hit me, when I realized that I am starting to live in an adult world. And may I also just say, the hints were not so subtle. My roommate just bought a house. Her very own, with her very own money. She's 24. And my highschool sweetheart called me the other day to tell me that he is getting married. He's 22. All my other friends are working full-time jobs, starting to be financially secure, building little nest eggs for "the future." Goddamn.
And here I am, close to 23 years old and still in school (albeit graduate school); soon to be back living in a dorm, not working full-time, certainly not buying a house, and nowhere close to even considering the possibility of marriage. And for my birthday, while grownups go to dinner, I'm going to a Lynard Skynard concert to scream my lungs out to a group of leathery-skinned, raggedy-old hippies. Peter Pan syndrome? Perhaps.
It's not that I don't want to grow up. No, wait. Maybe it's just that. I don't want to grow up. I remember being a child and saying to mysef that old people were boring and I never wanted to be an adult. Because old people don't know how to have fun. I also remember the moment that I stopped considering myself a child.
I was riding my bike in our house in Turin. We lived in a sort of gated community, and I would always go up to the gate and say hello to the guard and help him push the buttons to open the gate so that they cars could get in and out. And when you are a child in Italy, you don't have to address adults with the formal "you," but when you are no longer a child, you are expected to be respectful towards adults by using the formal "you" ("lei" versus "tu"). So I was riding my bike up there, I must have been thirteen or so, and I stopped and panicked, because I didn't know how to address the guard. So instead of going there, I turned around and went back. I just thought about what it meant that I now belonged to a different social world, with rules that I was expected to follow, and customs I was meant to uphold. That's how I knew I was no longer a child. And it just made me sad.
And now, I'm close to that point where I'm no longer a girl, but becoming a woman. And that is even worse. Because all "girls just wanna have fun," and most women just want to get by. Adults settle. They buy houses, they get married, they raise families, they build financial security... they grow roots and bear fruit. And there's nothing wrong with that. Except that I think most adults grow roots in places where they are not given room to grow. They cultivate bonsai trees instead of California redwoods. And I like feeling like I'm a little seed, still "blowing with the wind," looking for that soil which will allow me to grow into a full-fledged human.
Okay. All of these TERRIBLE analogies and musical references aside (you can sigh relief now, I said it first) -- I don't want to grow up. And everyone around me is doing just that. And it scares me because I don't know whether I should get with the times or just "keep on keeping on."