when I grow up

(not me but looks like me as a lad, kind of rocking the same gear too.)

fever ray - when I grow up (d lissvik remix)

gorgeous island pop number from fever ray, side project by the knife's singer, Karin Andersson. Very "La Isla Bonita," wistful and daydreamy, great lyrics, such as "I'm very good with plants, when my friends are away they let me keep the soil moist." It's haunting and warm, I ride for it.

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I think I turned thirty. A bit pre-emptively given my 1980 birth year, but then I've always been somewhat precocious. There are some extenuating circumstances that may have brought about this transition a little early: perhaps radiation from the greenpoint oil spill has prematurely aged my cells. This would explain why all my friends my age who live in greenpoint do things like get married and have children. Actually the getting married thing is more likely a particularly american trait - when visiting the states my european friends often express surprise that everybody's so signed, sealed and delivered. Or in the case of several europeans I know, they got tricked into it as a means towards extended residency.

As for my transition, it was arguably facilitated by getting a blackberry and moving to a one-bedroom apartment off the Graham stop. But the seeds were there, I'm sure, waiting to blossom. Last night I had separate conversations with two acquaintances about the nature of the 20-30 transition: one who stood herself on the threshold, and another who viewed his own crossing as something laying rather in the past. Both viewed it positively: the clutter accumulated by a manifold of competing, undeveloped desires begins to fall away, the shape of one distinct path begins to coalesce out of the haze, one 'grows into one's own skin,' and begins to more ardently filter out the things of this world which are irrelevant or counter-productive. My own natural propensity to such filtering no doubt contributed to my early-onset thirties. 

There is a certain subset of my closest friends, predominantly european, who I'd describe as being ageless souls. Their open-mindedness, their deep-welled inquisitiveness and sense of spontaneous pleasure all act like preservatives, encasing their spirits against erosion and decay. One gentleman in particular, a certain friend from Vienna, has always seemed to me to be simultaneously 16 and 45, as if he living out his stretch on this earth like he's caught in timewarp, like he's not fully arrived in the time of the now. But because his arrival from the past isn't fully completed, he lives both as boy and man, tuned to the joys of a stranger in this world.