josh Allan

I don’t know when it happened, but I started identifying with the “wicked witch.”

Yes, that wicked witch — the one from Oz, from the West and all that.

The past couple days it seems I’ve been inundated with the repercussions of adulthood. I’ve read Allison’s blog, and had numerous talks with people at my two jobs about this: the fact that growing up crushes your spirit.

It’s true: I’m not the same person I was two years ago when I graduated college. I am darker, more moody and angry, and the fact is, this “real world” that every college student is so itching to enter has trounced me something fierce. I didn’t want this to happen; I didn’t ask to be laid off from my job, I didn’t want to be unemployed for six months, it just sorta happened that way.

I am a raging idealist. I always have been. I dream big and I have big plans, and, honestly, I work my ass off to help make them happen. I am Elphaba (the “wicked” witch) in Defying Gravity. (If you have not heard this song, go right now and instantly download it from iTunes. I would print the lyrics, but it’s just not the same without the melody the orchestration and the intense passion of the music.)

I absolutely adore this musical. If you can get past the surface storyline, poppy hooks and sometimes cheesy lyrics, there’s some insightful — and sometimes pretty sinister — commentary on humanity, good, and wickedness. Things aren’t what they seem, and life always seems to exist in shades of gray rather than opposite blacks & whites.

The obvious problem is that I clearly associate with the green outcasted witch, whom we all know doesn’t meet a very pretty end when she meets a girl from Kansas and a bucket of H2O. But I am — I am clearly her, not Glinda, the “good” witch.

I don’t know if it’s inevitable — if I’m destined to a life of misery (again, I do enact the hyperbole, so don’t get too distraught about me). Maybe, to an extent, all people who are deep thinkers are, because we see the world for what it really is most of the time — a fairly hopeless, weighty mess. Of course, some would tell you that it’s all in your perspective, but what if it’s just reality? I’ve talked about that before, about the utter reality of something broken about this place called earth.

But that’s the other thing; I can see enough to know that I don’t want to be Elphaba from “For Good,” seemingly resigned and beaten — I want to be Elphaba from “Defying Gravity” (wow, you’re really going to have to spend some time with this musical to have any clue what the hell I’m talking about now). I don’t WANT to be a “cynical, crotchety, curmudgeonly older-than-your-years type of person,” to quote Allison. I can see enough to know that at this point, I still seem to have something that resembles a choice of where I go. But I feel a storm of bitterness approaching on my horizon, and that it’s only a matter of time — nothing but time — until it settles above me and lets its rain out.

God, help me.