I hear this in my head. I hear, I’m too young. I want to say, how can you be too young, but I don’t say anything at all in response. I think, well, maybe I am. I look for evidence of it. Who got published at 22? Who had a relationship at 22 that lasted past 23? Who had a relationship at 22 that lasted past 23 that was healthy and beautiful and went on and on and on? Who did anything meaningful at all at 22, except die, maybe. There were a lot of 22-year-olds, a lot of 20-year-olds even, who died in wars.

We live in such a perverse world. I mean this in the most literal sense possible. Opposition, contradiction. We value youth, we say. We want our Hollywood stars fresh-faced, wrinkle-free. But real youth–the youth measured not by lines on a forehead but by years, by how much we’ve done, by how much we haven’t done–we disregard. We call it cute, we call it charming. We want our fashion models that way because we don’t want our fashion models to be anything we respect. Then we draw a line.

All we’ve done is extend adolescence. When I was a teenager I used to think that the ideal age to be was somewhere in one’s 20s. I used to think that that’s what everyone craved. Teenagers wanted to be older, everyone else wanted to be younger. And now I find I’ve reached what I thought was the golden era, the time-of-all-times, only to learn that I’m still in the teenage-hood of society. Nobody thinks a 20-something can do anything worthwhile, because we’re, as they say, still learning.

This has turned into more of a diatribe than I meant it to be. All I meant it to be was a thought: that here I am, paying my own rent, expected to make a fool of myself. I know what I write now will, in ten year’s time, be irrelevant; I know my tone will change, my voice, my point of view. But still, I’d like to think that if I’m old enough to support myself, I’m old enough to be trusted with my own heart, my own soul.

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Has Facebook made the high school reunion redundant?

Yes, I realize I’m delving into the trite and the technical, but a few months ago I received an invite to my high school reunion and, to steal a phrase from Carrie Bradshaw (not something I ever saw myself doing, ever), I couldn’t help but wonder: in an era where every breath we take is published and publicized, what’s the point?

I saw myself standing with my colleagues on the campus where we spent our awkward years, nodding my head. “Oh, so you’re working in finance? Yeah, I thought I saw that on Facebook. Married? I noticed your relationship status had changed. Babies? Your album was cute. Grad school? Running your own business? Running seven marathons a year? Converting to Mormanism? Living in a yurt in Kathmandu? I saw the status update.”

In the heady days before Facebook, when it was possible for someone you’d spent four intensely uncomfortable years with to slip completely off your radar in a day, I envisaged the high school reunion with some satisfaction. My social discomfort at the time, my shy, blushing-at-everything countenance, made me the perfect candidate for a major five-years-later comeback. I would breeze into the room looking gorgeous and tanned (why do we think that tanned is somehow an indicator of good physical and emotional health?), my hair styled precisely to the trends of the moment, my clothes impressive in their well-tailored flattery and their obvious expense. I would have someone at my arm from well outside the sphere of the Santa Ynez Valley–an Englishman, preferably, who I’d met in New York City, where I’d settled after college to finish my novel (the one with the big advance) and write an enormously popular column. I would be a little tired–just got back from a trip to South Africa, research for my next book, you know–but the transformation from angst-ridden outcast to real-world success would be stunning.

But here’s the truth of it: we can’t shock each other anymore. Everyone I’m friends with on Facebook is already going to know what I look like these days, that I’m living abroad, that I’m getting another degree. If they read this blog they’ll even know that I’m poorer than dirt and have no wildly popular column to boast about. We grew up with each other, my classmates and I, but then (and we were really the first generation to do this) we continued growing up with each other, remotely. We saw all the college relationships, distilled to a single line (”in a relationship with…”, “it’s complicated with..”), all the parties, distilled to a wittily-named online album. We saw the shifts in geography, the aquisition of degrees (or not), the weddings, the children, the message that so-and-so wrote to so-and-so. What’s left to tell?

I ask myself, too: am I bitter because I’m not going? In that sophomore-year vision of an eight-year-older me, I never once considered skipping the event. But here I am, and the pressures of adulthood dictate that I stay put at the end of April, remain in Oxford, with (go figure) my Englishman, working on (go figure again) my book, living my already very public life. (But frankly, the way the weather is looking today, you couldn’t pay me to miss Oxford in full springtime bloom.)

A very close friend of mine wrote me a letter recently. “To be perfectly honest,” she wrote, “I think without you there I would be reverted back to the shy/awkward/semingly semi-retarded person I was at Dunn,” and the awful truth is, so would I. I can picture the scene much more clearly on this side of graduation. I would stand there, with my loyal Englishman at my arm, looking nice, dressed well, holding in my head the knowledge of my in-process book, my Oxford life, the places I’ve been, the places I’ll go, and I would become as dumb and uncomfortable as I was at 15.

Maybe I ought to be happy that Facebook has made it possible for me to feel smug without ever having to set foot on the campus of my alma mater. Maybe it’s not that Facebook has made the high school reunion redundant, exactly; it’s that it’s made it redundant for people who only ever considered going for the shallow aim of proving a point (i.e., you were wrong about me; in fact, I was wrong about myself). Maybe it’s that it will make the event less about showing off and more about socializing in a genuine way.

I’ll never know–but, because I can, because this is the world we’re living in and this is who I am in it now, I’ll blog about it anyway.

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My mood at the moment: lustful. I lust for longer days, warmer evenings, summer dresses. I lust for new clothes (I spend hours at the computer, clicking photographs of things I can’t afford). I lust for the glow of inspiration to sparkle into a frenzy of of productivity. And by wanting this so much, I stay stuck (it’s the trickery of Spring).

The city has emptied herself again, tipped the students out, and we see who is left. “The arselickers who stayed,” Philip Larkin called them (called us). But all I can think is that now that they are gone I will go to the Bodleian and get lost amongst the books.

Suddenly Monday nights are blank in a good way, they are quiet again, and as I glide wraithlike down the High street under eleven o’clock darkness there might be no one but me in all the city, no one but me and the lonely kebab vendor, in his cloud of grease and chip smells, no one but me and the lonely kebab vendor and the ghosts crawling over the college walls, frolicking in the gardens while they can.

(The Man gets home late, I hear him undressing and the birds starting to wake simultaneously; he slips into bed beside me while the night is melting into morning, and our window is wide open).

I forget how still Jericho is. On Plantation Road I lean against the curb with my bicycle, so warm I’ve shed even my cardigan, and wait for a few minutes just to feel the sun and the stillness. Later a friend and I sit in the garden with a bottle of strong beer between us, chasing a pool of sunshine to the edge of the grass. It’s like a wilderness this far away from the house, hugging the brambles coming over the fence.

We talk of Africa. I haven’t been to Africa, I almost say, but the truth is that I have. I forget that I have; the Africa I’ve been to is smoky, spicy, sultry in the way I imagine the Middle East to be (but how would I know?). Not the Africa I used to dream about. But then, we all have different Africas, maybe; and I think about how complicated our relationship with place is, anyway, how much love and experience it takes to get to the root of it.

Later I meet the Man for a drink; we should go back to Fés soon, he says, apropos of nothing, nothing but the strange exhilaration which has overtaken everyone now that the weather is turning warm again. Is it really only the warmth, the clarity of light, that makes us believe in the glory of the future, the adventure of a summer, again?

Funny, I think.

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I’m doing a reasonable amount of reading at the moment. Revisiting Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy (secretly thinking, ok, if she can win a Booker, why can’t I?), alongside heavy perusal of a book called Shell Shock: Traumatic Neurosis and the British Soldiers of the First World War by Peter Leese. This may or may not be research for something; it remains to be seen (or admitted).

Also finishing Beloved. My opinion of it this time around is cloudy at best. It’s a shame, because my hatred for it was so pure for so many years. Overwritten, overwrought, over-hyped. Simple. Now I think, there may be no joy in reading it, but maybe I was a little hard on Toni Morrison, because sometimes there’s something just this side of beautiful about the whole thing. Maturity breeds indecision, it would seem.

Also on my mind: Pico Iyer’s The Lady and the Monk, which I’m strolling through for structural and narrative inspiration (this may or may not be the reason for my recent obsession with seasons).

*The title of this post refers not to “Reading” the place but in fact the act of “reading” a book, to clarify any possible confusion…

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On the way to work, sudden blossoms. They came overnight. First the delicate yellow flowers outside our front door, now, on the trees, a bloom of white. It’s warm enough to cycle in ballet flats, no socks–that’s a good warm, it’s all I’d ask of March. Yesterday, we ate lunch outside, in the garden.

With these sudden blossoms comes, too, a sudden remembrance of my love for the city. I hope this infusion of affection seeps into the work I’m doing on the book. The freeze of winter has made me cold about the project, not lacking in theoretical enthusiasm but lacking in the ability to translate thought into word. I’ve been drawn into myself like a creature curled in its own shell. I wouldn’t want to make this malady specific, wouldn’t want it to lose its poetry by pinpointing it preciesely, giving it a name, say, Seasonal Affective Disorder. Then again, perhaps it’s like the aquisition of a degree: Miranda Ward, GAD, SAD. (Or, indeed, like a Dr. Seuss rhyme).

But I don’t think it’s like this. I think what I feel in winter is a choice. I like to wrap myself in the cocoon of my own worries, like to hibernate in my study, fretting, picking at my own fingers, sighing, watching the naked trees, thinking that my projects are languishing, my ability shrinking. It makes the transition to Spring sweeter, makes me feel like, as soon as the blossoms come, I can shed my ugly countenance, wear something nicer for the Summer.

I wasn’t always like this. I’m a California girl, you see; not obsessed with seasons, not even aware of them except for the changes in light and the subtle shift of colour. I write this often, so it must be important to me. I write, often, too, of how my time in Boston made me aware of something I’d never known before, about my own reaction to the malleability of days, my own obsession with the weather. (The Man says that when I enthuse about temperature or sun or rain in the way that I can, sometimes, I become in that moment almost perfectly British.)

But still, here we are, at the edge. I’m hoping that the expanding sunlight makes the work, too, expand, so that it fills the days like blossoms and warmth. Punting weather, garden weather.

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