Geriatrics

One day four years ago, I was at a combined dinner group in my ward, and I was introducing myself to someone. I explained that it was my first semester and I had just gotten home from my mission. Our elders quorum president was sitting nearby, and he was shocked. He said, "I thought you were like 25, just about to graduate!" I'm not sure if that meant that at 21 I was overly mature for my age or overly bland for my age.

Now I really am 25, just about to graduate. I wonder what age people think I am now. But I feel old. I know that all of you who are older than me are laughing at me. But in the world I'm in, I'm old. I see all the birth years for people whose records I bring into my ward, and most of the guys tend to be born in 1991 or 1992. I've seen girls born as late as 1995. I went into first grade in 1995. On Friday, in our French lab we were supposed to tell about our first day of college. One girl was a freshman, so her first day was only in September. My first day was January 4, 2010. On Friday night, we had a couscous party for my French class. Someone asked me if I knew someone from the Spokane mission, and I asked if he served more recently. He said, "No, he's been home two years." That's recent to me.

I have had classmates younger than me who not only are married but have kids. I don't really mind that I'm not married. (I do have one relative who, regardless of whether she actually thinks this, seems like she thinks my worth is dependent on my marital status. Maybe that's why she unfriended me this week.) However, I do sometimes worry about going through life without having a posterity. Especially when there are so many dumb people having babies.

There are all sorts of dumb parents who have no idea how to raise children. I don't know how to raise children either, but I'm sure I would do a better job than they do. These parents tend to be parents precisely because they are dumb. They love their kids, but they seem to love them in a way that aunts and uncles should love them, not the way parents should love them. They seem to have other relatives do most of the child rearing. And their kids have picked up or will pick up all the life-destroying habits of their dumb parents. I am a virgin, and their teenage kids are not. It doesn't seem fair that a responsible almost-college-grad like me doesn't have kids, when these morons are out there procreating all they want.

This week I took an editing test for the Joseph Smith Papers. Part of it was a spelling test--I had to correct misspelled words. One of the words was innocuous, which was spelled "inocuous." So I fixed it. But then in the editing test I came across inoculate, which I knew had only one n. I could see a relationship between those two words, so I second-guessed myself and took the second n out of innocuous, thus making it wrong instead of right. I also had never heard of the word bellwether, so that one I missed as well. Oh well. I don't have to be perfect. Just better than everyone else.

I have no idea where I will be in three months, whether I will be in Provo or North Salt Lake. I'm trying to find the good in either situation. If I lived at home, I would be able to finally get my room clean and spend more time with my family. If I stay in Provo, my social life would be better and I'm more likely to find a spouse. I have no idea where I will end up.

I'm so glad we made it through January. It really is the worst month.