(Warning: This didn’t start as a rant, but it became a rant. Yay!)

First of all, it’s June. Where the blazes did half of 2010 go already? Secondly, there are many happenings this month so far. It’s my last month of the day job before summer vacation (sweet!) and I cannot wait until I have all of that glorious writing time. Because it will be glorious. As it is, I can’t dig into a local café (and there are tons in Williamsburg) for more than an hour before I need to get back to work/life, and one of my favorite places to write is at a café, with an iced coffee or tea sweating on the table beside me.

Then, nearly every weekend this month we have friends visiting from out of town. It’s a magical time when friends visit. It gives us an excuse to stop being homebodies and actually explore this fantastic neighborhood and the entire city, making us feel better about the money we’re spending. We’re seeing a Broadway show! There are street fairs! Museum exhibits! Good times to be had by all! If left to our own devices I will hide in a corner with my laptop and the boy wonder will play a game (or, now, play with the kitten)… or I’ll play a game (oh, Little Big Planet, you are addictive), or we’ll cook or bake… But we live, as so many people remind us, in frakking New York City! Which apparently obligates us, by virtue of the necessity of allowing others far away to live vicariously through us, to go “out” and “have fun.” We do. Just last week, we were invited to Milk & Honey, a bar that is not myth! I had two of the best cocktails I’ve ever had in my life. But we don’t do that kind of thing all the time. We strive to live sustainable lives.

The “New York City life of a twentysomething” is one stereotype I’ve never fully understood. (There’s an episode of Sex and the City that goes into this; twentysomethings here are supposed to live lives of fun, carefree frivolity involving many one-night stands and much alcohol, the kind of lives that thirtysomethings and fortysomethings regard with mild jealousy. This confuses me!) But how can a twentysomething (who isn’t one of the rare 6-figure earning twentysomethings, or who doesn’t have daddy’s credit card) actually afford to go out all of the time, especially in an economy where so many people in our age bracket are losing their jobs? Unless you love dive bars, hole-in-the-wall restaurants, or you know someone who can pull you into a “cool” place, bypassing an expensive cover, going “out” costs add up. Usually going out makes more sense than, say, having a house party — especially when a lot of people I know are either renting rooms in multi-room apartments with relative strangers, living in a “box” of a studio (which we did! We did that!), or living outside the city entirely (which makes grabbing a group together to go to their place a trek rather than a casual jaunt).

This phase is a unique one: the post-college, pre-”real life” phase of learning to be an adult, finding a grown-up identity (because, yes, that identity we discover as teenagers gets smashed by college, then that collegiate identity gets ripped apart by the “real world”…) All of that fun stuff! I’ve been told a lot, by a various folks that the twenties are “a magical time” or somesuch, that I mustn’t “squander” my time, that I need to “live life while I still have one.” Um, what? (Does that mean that one’s life ends with marriage and/or children? Really?) Do those people realize that telling me that is akin to telling a teenager that they will “get over” all of their teenage drama and hardships, that they just have to “suck it up and deal”? (Because I was told that. That being a teenager was a phase I needed to push through, like slogging through mud, and I’d get through to the other side filthy but whole. Thanks, advisors, for telling me that. Helped so much with the day to day of teenage life, knowing that I was sunk neck-deep in mud out of which I’d eventually discover how to crawl.)

I didn’t know how to deal with that well-meaning advice then, and I don’t really know how to live without “squandering” my life now. What does that even mean? Perhaps it’s because I spend part of my days with a lot of New York City moms — every conceivable (positive and negative) stereotype of them — and all sorts of babysitter/nanny-types. A lot of them ask me the usual questions, get a little picture of me, then proceed to give me life advice. Sometimes there are some pleas — “Don’t have children yet! Please! Don’t! Doooon’t!”) Sometimes there are lectures: You should do this. You should do that. (Because I’m asking for it? Like I was when I was a teenager? I am definitely the kind of person who enjoys making and learning from her own mistakes rather than getting inundated with well-meant but not applicable advice, thank you!) I heard a peer say that the twenties are for partying, the thirties for marrying, the forties for kids. That was the life plan, and she was following that perfectly. Plenty of time, later, for “important things”! Some moms have made similar comments. Why are you married so young? The twenties are a time for freedom! (Because a marriage isn’t… free? Because one can’t do what one wants to do… while also in a committed relationship?) This is not to say that one ought to be in a relationship, please don’t get me wrong, but can’t we make our own choices? Can’t we decide that being committed is just as fun as being single, simply different?

This whole sensation, this well-meant advice about how I ought to be spending my twenties, is very similar to what people said when we got engaged. That for a forward-thinking, modern, feminist woman to be engaged! Before thirty! Oh dear me! What is the world coming to? My response then was, well, wasn’t the feminist movement — isn’t it still? — ultimately about freedom of choice? The ability for a woman to make individual life choices that suit her, not ones that should suit all women or ones that used to suit most women? So why am I supposed to be living my twenties in one way? It’s almost as if there’s this implication that my example pulls down the average for all free, single-life loving twentysomething women everywhere. I’m ruining the curve, oh no!

If I lived in a different state, in a small town, would it even be weird for me to be married? Some kids I went to high school with have kids now. I read a piece in New York Magazine this week, a brief spot on 26-year-old Leelee Sobieski. About being a “young” mom, she says,

“People in the middle of America have babies at my age,” Sobieski says. Had she and Kimmel planned to be parents this early? She pauses. “We fell in love,” she finally says. Still, “I wish I had a girlfriend that had a baby. That would be so nice. I feel like I’m doing this thing that’s really weird, but I look around me and realize that everyone has babies. Look at all these people! So what?”

This is, I think, what some people who have urged me to “live life!” in my twenties are worried about happening to me. That now that I’m married, logic says BABIES! and clearly, babies will ruin my stereotypical twentysomething fun. Some mothers (especially some of the mothers I’ve met who had their first children rather “late in life”) have even expressed mild skepticism when I say we’re not planning on babies yet. (Clearly, I must be mistaken, because I am married. CLEARLY. Women who want no babies, who are married? I feel your pain. Why does society insist on it? Can’t it be up to us?) If I spend a Saturday night — or Memorial Day Weekend — at home, watching TV, cooking dinner, playing the PlayStation… why is that wrong? Someone asked me recently what I’d done over my holiday weekend. Did I go on vacation? Did I go to the beach? Did I leave the city as one ought? No, I said, we stayed in. We adopted a kitten. We made hanger steak. There was a significant pause. “Why didn’t you go out?” I paused. “Should we have?” They paused. “Well, we had fun this weekend! We went to X, we did Y…” Well, good for you. No, really — good for you; I’m not bitter. I had fun. You did, too. Yay for all!

I don’t know where this rant is going — do rants go to any sensible conclusion? But the bottom line is that I am in my twenties and I am having fun. I’m not living my life with any regrets and it bothers me that some people assume I am because I’m married, because I’m… I have no idea! Well, people will assume and I can let them. I’m happy and I’m enjoying the experience that is my life, in all of its uncertainties, new experiences, and happy days of relaxing in front of the television or cooking dinner with my husband (and kitty!). We do things, too. Maybe they’re not the things other twentysomethings do, but we’re not interested in being them. We’re interested in being us. A lot of the “grown ups” I’ve gotten to know the last year assume that there’s something wrong with my life because I’m not following the life path they followed. Some have blatantly judged me for it. To them, I say: I’m doing just fine, thanks.