The other day I was driving around town in traffic and a thought dawned on me. I'm officially in my 30's. I'm a bona fide adult. No longer can I hide behind "young adulthood" as I did in my 20s. When I turned 30 it didn't really count because I just got there so it's okay to still think of myself as 20ish still. But once I clearly crossed over into 30 something territory there's no turning back--It's official. In fact I vaguely recall and old tv show called thirtysomething and if memory serves me correctly everyone on that show looked so old! Its hard to grasp the fact that I've arrived, I'm here, I'm those old thritysomethings. How strange, I still feel like a kid most of the time.
When I reflect back on my life I can clearly see the places where I've grown and changed. My point of view and thoughts no longer (most of the time at least--although my husband would beg to differ) revolve around myself. But oftentimes I forget that I'm actually an adult. It feels so foreign to me and I wonder if I'll feel the same when I'm 40, 50 or even 60. I suppose once I have kids then I'll have a constant in my face reminder that I'm not a kid anymore?
It seems like it was only yesterday that my brother and I were still at home as kids without a care in the world. Our family never really went on vacations--no money. We would occasionally travel to Taiwan with my grandma to visit with my mom's sister and my brother and we'd get to play with our cousins. But traveling overseas was expensive back then so those trips were few and far between. Long distance phone calling back then was also expensive and the connection was terrible. This was before the age of the internet when programs like skype was only something you'd see on startrek. So my brother and I did what any other normal kid would have done to keep in touch with their cousins. We made tape recordings!! We would have full on conversations with them, read them stories and just tell them about the goings on at our house all on tape and send that to them. They would in turn send us a tape back--kind of like audio pen-pals of sorts. Naturally this only made sense because my brother and I didn't read or write any chinese and my cousins, they didn't read or write english.
So during the summer months my brother and I passed the time by keeping ourselved productively occupied. We stayed up late, watched way too much television, and played video games till we, or perhaps just me, wanted to puke. We'd watch SNL, or if that wasn't on then we'd watch Wrestling (back when it was still under the WWF banner). Later one new late night tv shows popped up such as In Living Color, Mad TV giving us a wider selection of shows to watch or sometimes we'd watch a combination of two shows flipping back and forth between channels at the commercial break. When my brother got older we'd watch late night talk shows; his favorite was David Letterman. When those choice tv programs were over we'd watch late night infomercials (remember Ron Popeil??). We didn't have cable and this was before food network anyways so our favorite infomercials was the food related inventions (think the showtime rotisserie grill - you "set it and forget it").
My brother picked all the programmings that we'd watch but I was to little to understand or care. I was just excited to NOT be sleeping. Although sometimes I'd be too tired and give in and go to bed but when our show came on my brother would run to my room, shake me awake and we'd go watch tv together. Naturally one cannot simply just watch these late night television programs by itself - no that would be weird. We'd spend tons of prep time before hand gathering snacks, getting beverages, and heating up other frozen treats to nosh on while we watched TV.
Sometime during all these late night escapades muscle juice was born. What's muscle juice you ask? Muscle Juice is basically the entire contents of both our refrigerator AND cupboards dumped into a single cup. Anything goes and no two concoction of muscle juice was ever the same. From the fridge we'd usually have ketchup, mustard, relish, salad dressing, milk, orange juice or apple juice or both, satay sauce (asian bbq sauce), peanut butter or sesame paste or both, jams (whatever flavor we had on hand), and I can't recall if the mix involved an egg or not. From the cupboards the normal contenders were salt, pepper (both black pepper and white pepper), soy sauce, vinegar, vegetable oil, chocolate milk power (or chocolate milk syrup from the fridge) and occasionally the dry power mix from an packet of instant noodles. These lists are by no means exhaustive and sometimes we'd have more ingredients other times less. It all depended on what was available to us in the fridge and cupboard at the time and how creative we were feeling. At one point I feel like we squeezed in the black stuff from the inside of a squid although I now can't recall clearly. We'd mix the contents of the cup together with a single solitary chopstick and we would then pinch our nose and each take a swig of our creation and proclaim loudly that we've been rejuvenated, reinvigorated and 23472342870 times stronger than before we began. Popeye had his spinach but we, we had our muscle juice.
Good times!!
Of course no human being can finish off and entire glass of muscle juice. We'd be too strong and litteraly destroy our entire house so to keep this stuff from falling into the wrong hands we threw it up and over the wall in our backyard. No one was ever the wiser.
Sometimes I wonder if my mom knew what we did....
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