Life sucks when you're having fun.

I spent the weekend (actually, Saturday through Monday, which has thrown me all off, I have no idea what day it is right now) at Tim and Andrea's house in Albany. Tim and I decided that it would be a good idea to sort through the hundreds of letters that we, along with a handful of other friends (Annika), wrote to each other as teenagers.

The back story here is that we all met at Powell House, a Quaker retreat center in upstate New York where we would go for weekend conferences on Peace and Love and other such fuzzy topics. I started going when I was about ten, and by the time I reached high school age and was home schooling and had no friends where I lived, they were all I had. Long story short, the friends I made there are the people I know I will be friends with until I am dead, no matter how long that takes.

Spending the weekend sorting and scanning letters, so full of teen angst that I cried laughing more than once, was interesting. While it seems to have made Tim think about his children's fast approaching teenage years, all it did for me was make me miss what we used to have together. Nights spent dying our hair pink, staying up all night, waiting for vampires on the roof outside my window (yes, there was a serious Anne Rice obsession, very angsty) and refusing to drink apple/orange juice for ill defined moral reasons.

I like being a grown up, I'm happy (more or less, depending on the day) with the choices I've made since then, the partner I chose, the kids I love, the school, the evolution to grown-up dinner parties in place of teenage silliness, but still. Nostalgia, *sigh.* Why is it that when we're teens, all we want to do is grow up/drive/stay out all night/drink beer/have sex/be free/complain about not having these things, and then in retrospect we look back and say damn, we didn't know how good we had it? Just thinking along these lines makes me feel old.