Don't be afraid to define things differently...

Age is a little bit of a deceiving thing, a label at best. I've learned over the years, especially over the past few days, that living a life worth living, chasing rainbows and blue skies, desert flowers and perfect peeling waves on faraway beaches, is all something completely separate from growing up or getting older.

So what's with the Michelle Branch video? Well first, I &#$%ing love Michelle Branch, and secondly, if it stirs just a little wanderlust in you, or causes just a little flip in your stomach that maybe you're still as young as you once were, that maybe you can still drive off in some old Volkswagen van and find freedom and fun off in some distant desert, then maybe age isn't what you thought it might be. Maybe it's all in how you live your life. I watch that video and my heart skips and I get excited to just run away with June and Zo. I still feel those feelings...still smile at those images. I guess what I'm getting at is we just might be aging ourselves in the worst of ways with the work we do, the mortgages we hold, the fences we build around our lives. You can do anything that you want to do. So do it.

I'm thirty-eight years old, and I'm still desperate for all of those things that sent me flipping out into the great wide open all those years ago...to Paris, and Twenty-nine Palms...to Venice and Rome, and Big Sur and Berkeley...I feel overcome with romance and idealism and excitement and wishful someday mornings...I'm still looking for, as Lloyd Dobler once said, that "dare to be great situation." I'm still desperate for the warmth of sunshine on my face, and to create something that will last, and that might make someone else see me as something else. I still want to explore and learn, and kiss a girl, my girl, on the end of a million mile long pier jutting out into the great golden glow of an end of the day Pacific Ocean. I want to drive fast on Hwy 1 through a winding, windy California coast, and I want to laugh and push and shove and hug and chase each other through the narrow streets of Montmartre, and all the way up those stairs to Sacre Couer so that we can see all of Paris stretching out beneath us...all of Paris and the rest of our lives. I want all of that still.

I have friends that are old, made weary by work, by missed opportunities, or by dreams long left untouched. I don't want that. I don't mind the grey that is slowly creeping onto my temples because it means nothing more than the fact that I've been around awhile. I do mind the way in which so many of the people I know have given up on discovering what's around every corner, and what they're truly capable of...or of accepting the person that they've always known themselves to be when it might not even e close to the person who they could or should become.

I want everything, and laughably, kind of all at once. I want to feel the way that I do sipping an early morning coffee on the corner of El Camino Real and Avenido Presdio in San Clemente, CA, with the sun shining bright and the day empty of expectations but full of sunshine and possibilities. If I could feel that way every day of my life I'd feel twenty-one for the rest of my life. I kind of already do.

So what was the point of all this? Just watch the video, ignore Michelle Branch's ridiculous headband thingy, and feel like you can do anything. My version of anything just tends to have deserts and VW vans in it. Yours can have whatever.

BTW...this song is pretty awesome.

Also... how bloody cute is this.