disobedience

When I was 19, in college, surrounded by leisure and debaucery, it was easy to rid oneself of responsibility, lay back and revel in the absolutely interminable conversations of youth. What do you believe in? Are you religious? Are you a virgin? Can you make me a mix tape? Let's order pizza.

I have always been on the cusp of extreme rule following and minor rebellion. My friends were obnoxious, opinionated, dogmatic, perhaps. There were a lot of males - really messy, sloppy, loud, lazy guys. Drinking forties, wearing the same jeans for weeks, throwing trash into the backseat, wanting to light things on fire. I was the voice of reason. Maybe not a good idea right now, guys. There's a cop right there. I want my security deposit back eventually.

It has always boggled my mind that I decided to encompass myself with such different personalities from myself. I can't say that I didn't think their behavior was funny at times; they were hilarious. I found great pleasure in making the people in my life more straight-laced than myself gasp. It was even better that it was them and not me. At the same time, I was driven by a force...a force ruled by obedience, aquiescence. The feeling that something really bad could happen if we got out-of-line. As I progressed through life after college, I drifted further and further away from such people until I found myself responsible, calm, a member of the working class with health insurance and a clean apartment.

Obviously this is the path of many. Buckle down and get it done. Go through life and follow the straight and narrow. Pay your bills, do your laundry, call your mother, eat a balanced meal. But I think that with the rigid adherence to these rules comes a feeling of loss. Too much rule following and you lose the spontaneity of human connection and dare I say, the sloppy mishaps that lead to the greatest stories and affinity for your compatriots. I am not saying that loving relationships happen only when the scales are unbalanced or that a full life is one that is fraught with disobedience. I wrestle with the monotony of daily life and struggle to find inspiration, but I also can get inflamed by disorder. I need to remember that sometimes inspiration comes from hours alone thinking or cleaning our apartment or calling my family or some other wholly predictable, rule following activity. But sometimes that inspiration comes from a night on a rooftop until four in the morning with my obstreperous husband and our sloppy compatriots.