"One must imagine Sisyphus happy," wrote Albert Camus in 1942. Weldon has been made a Commander of the British Empire for her contributions to British culture. Her recent book, Habits of the House, is a novel of class boundaries and sexual scandal set in an English rural estate at the turn of the 20th century. She won a Writers' Guild Award for the pilot episode of Upstairs, Downstairs, a BBC television progenitor of Downton Abbey. and learning how to enjoy them.Is Jonathan Franzen More Like John Lennon or Paul McCartney?įay Weldon is winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize ( The Heart of the Country, 1989) and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize (1979, Praxis). Yay for beautiful, wonderful in-between stages. For right now, I’m going to listen to these crickets and go to sleep. Tomorrow will take care of itself, and one way or t’other I will learn how to take out insurance policies and all the rest of it when the time comes. Calm, unified (somehow or another, all of them chirruping at once-how do they do that, anyway?), one of my own personal symbols of summer and laziness-and I realized, It doesn’t matter. I’m not ready to grow up-I’m ready to be alive before I have to worry about paying for my own life insurance policy!Īnd then, in the midst of my freak out… I heard the crickets outside. Everyone knows that lawyers don’t know what they’re talking about-and I repeat, I am not an adult, despite the legalese. I am not an adult! Yes, if you review my birth certificate, you will come to the conclusion that I am eighteen, and therefore legally an adult. Insurance! Me! I’m going to have to do Geico and State Farm and All State and all those companies that have the disgustingly scripted commercials on every channel on TV! Not to mention utility bills, and telephone bills, and rent, and hospital money if I have to visit a doctor-all of that adult stuff. Whew.īut tonight I was thinking-either way, married or not, I’m going to have to buy insurance. That means doing someone else’s laundry, falling in the toilet at 2AM because the toilet seat was left up, "taco nights" on Tuesdays and Thursdays, maybe even snoring-I won’t even be able to sleep in my own bed-I’ll have to take up residence on the couch! Luckily that little panic attack passed-with a combination of Buddhist breathing techniques and assurances from a friend (who fortunately for me was still awake and tolerant of my psychotic break) that I didn’t have to get married if I didn’t want to. I mean, seriously, in four years, I could be married right now. My first flip-out was about getting married. Because I realize just how quickly these four years of high school passed (and thank God-who would want to go through that again?) and then I ask myself, If four miserable years passed so quickly, how fast will four fun years go by? But at night, a different viewpoint sets in-settles over me like a thunderhead gathering on the horizon. New people, new learning opportunities (not to mention actually learning things I’m interested in), new landscapes, new stuff to do, new everything-and I’m all up-and-down on-top-of all-over a chance to start over. I'm not dead, and college is just a few short weeks away. I was totally convinced that I would die before I went to college it just seemed so alien and far-away (and impossibly wonderfully, really) to actually ever happen to me. To be completely honest, I never thought I would actually get here. this whole college thing is taking me a little by surprise.
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