Ankle tattoos, lattes, iPhones and Bravo (from Issue 8)

“I want to be divorced someday”, isn’t the line someone wants to hear on a first date. In this golden new age of finding oneself, there is a distraction of falling into the messy pits of desirable flings, trysts, and experiences we all want to taste.

Instead of taking up dance or cooking classes, the bored housewife dates a younger man. Instead of upping his golf swing, the power executive man dons a deep v-neck shirt, frosts his tips and goes hunting in the night clubs that for some reason don’t have age limits. There is an existential pining in the hearts and minds, and libidos, of Americans now in any age range.

It used to just be the college graduate deciding between globe hopping and grad school. Or it was the mid-life crisis victims in the suburbs ending up in a Porsche and a weeklong cruise to Jamaica. Now it is all the more extreme, perhaps because of a world in disarray and ever increasing needs to feel younger.

It was bad enough when the saying a few years ago was “40 is the new 30”. Now it’s “40 is the new do-whatever-the-hell-I-want-because-I-don’t-want-to-grow-old”. This usually ends up in midnight mayhem and ankle tattoos.

I made a list of things I want to try before I hit 30. They include the not too extreme ingredients of sky diving, East Indian cuisine, polo, photography and tap dance classes. And on the back of the café napkin, encircled with the milky-brown coffee stain, I wrote the five things I want to do, just to say I did them.

In no specific order here they are: enter a hot dog eating contest, fight a Guido, vote Democrat, get married and get divorced. Yes, get divorced. The last two are paired up next to each other to show my lack of belief in either of them. They actually correspond with, in that sense, the other three activities.

Constantly surrounded by life goals of wanting kids before 30, two cars and a high five figure income, I felt it was my right to extend opposing wants in my life. If 40 is the new 15, why shouldn’t I hold back on landing a concrete suburban life? That’s if I end up in suburbia.

We live in a society where the perfect creation of a latte is more important than soul searching. We are delineated and defined by those who care more about their makeup than their own children; where people drive on shiny rims and roll right into an apartment complex. It’s such an upside down blueberry pie world we live in and in order to, in so many ways, flip off the social currents and flows I have made it a virtuous objective to be unique.

I fight every day to stay away from the grips of boredom in this desert town, but I can appreciate the fact that I’m on the other side of mostly everyone. It does kind of suck knowing I share some of the same social beliefs as dread lock wearers and potheads, but hey, whatever works. So, maybe one day I’ll get married for the heck of it to shake up social restfulness. But trust me, I will also succumb to the same post-marital fate as 49% of American couples who were supposedly meant to be. Just for the fun of it.

By Nick Esquer

[Nick is an American who will be commencing study at Macquarie in 2010. We feel rather chuffed that he found our editorial guidelines and submitted something to our little publication].