Recently, I've found myself thinking about the fact that here in Bulgaria I have more guy friends than girl friends.  This is the first time in my life that this has been the case.  In college, I joined a sorority and after college I worked on a MA in English--neither of these are institutions that are crawling with straight guys.  So this week I was in my pj's brushing my teeth and staring at myself the bathroom mirror wondering if I'd been going about this all wrong for years.  It's not like I was purposefully was ignoring guys or uninterested in them--just the opposite but now without trying I have all of these really great and fun guys in my life.  Funny how it takes moving to a foreign country to put things in perspective.

These guys aren't from another planet.  They are well read, they like to listen to music and watch movies, they eat well and are in pursuit of strong drinks--enter rakia-- and a good time out at night.  I've never been board hanging out with them, not once in four months.  The one thing is that they don't plan very far ahead and that's not really even a surprise to me after living with guys for the last few years in Washington DC.  These guys are just guys and all of a sudden I've found myself one of the guys. Kind of.

I think that part of this is that the stakes are different here in Bulgaria.  I came to see the country, to learn the language, to meet new people and to have an adventure--I didn't come to find true love.  Thus the pressures are different.  We worry about finding a great bar for the night or about where we'll meet for dinner.  In fact, none of my expat friends here are in serious relationships, none are engaged or getting married, none are buying houses or jockeying for better paying jobs.  We are here living in the "new Europe" as my director once put it and I am on an odyssey.<!--more-->

While here, I've been lucky enough to make some friends here in Bulgaria who are on similar journeys.  It just happens that these friends are nearly all guys.

What does it mean that most of the expats that I know and spend time with are men? Well, I wondered at first if it had to with me.  Was I just not seeking out female friends? No that was not the case at all.  I have some good female friends who are Bulgarian.  So I started thinking about how many female expats I know in Bulgaria.  The list is pretty short.  I know fewer than five.  To put this in perspective, there was not a single girl in the language class that I took in August; there were six guys of varying ages and me.

So here I am on my odyssey, on my move-to-a-country-where-you-don't-know-the-language-adventure and for the first time in my life I don't have any female competitors--no classmates, no co-workers and no sorority sisters.  I am going this one alone but I can't help but wonder where have they all gone? Did I take a wrong turn? Did I miss a signal? How did I get separated from the pack? Have the sirens got me? Am I now going to be left behind?

The idea of an odyssey clearly comes from Homer's <em>The Odyssey</em>--an epic adventure-- but recently I was reminded of  David Brooks' article which ran last fall in the NYT titled<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/opinion/09brooks.html" target="_blank"> "The Odyssey Years."</a> He explains here that there is a new stage or phase in the life cycle.  He defines this as "the odyssey, the decade of wandering that frequently occurs between adolescence and adulthood."

Brooks is right to think about this period in the lives of twenty-somethings.  I know that as a twenty-something myself I have unprecedented freedoms and access--I had a great job with a good salary and decent health care.  I was able to make the choice to live in a group house and in doing so I could to afford to go out to dinner, to meet my friends out for drinks and to see shows but I was also able to make the decision to live and travel abroad for a year.  At twenty-seven, I could undertake the serious but calculated risk of leaving my job to pursue a Fulbright.  To do so has been transformational.  But when Brooks talks about the odyssey years he describes them as a period of delay.

Brooks highlights the way we twenty-somethings delay serious relationships with flirting on facebook or attending graduate school; he implies that we trade home ownership for the security of living with our parents, that we pick nights out with our friends over raising children and we hop from job to job rather than settling down for steady work for the same company.  He claims are extending our adolescence into the period of time that was once adulthood.

But what then are the markers that actually make us adults?  Can we really believe that the markers of marriage, home ownership and parenthood are the only markers that qualify us to become adults? Am I any less of an adult because I left my job, sold my furniture and moved some boxes of books, photos and clothes back to my parent's house?

But the problem with this argument is that the markers Brooks uses to identify and name adulthood are markers of another generation and another time.  He is using them as markers of responsibility--a wife, a family, a home, a good job.  These markers traditionally imply that one is able to think, act and behave responsibly but they don't require it. In fact, I think that many of us are skeptical when it comes to these traditional markers of adulthood.  We've seen our parent's marriages end in divorce; we've seen companies fire life-long employees without regard to this commitment; and most recently we've watched the dream of home ownership unravel before our eyes.

Responsibility then isn't about having things--a wife, a family, a home, or even a good job--it's about good choices.  I realize that this isn't such an easy distinction to make especially when it comes to discussing a whole generation of twenty-somethings.  So when Brooks implies that twenty-somethings in the odyssey phase of their are delaying their own responsibility, I respectfully have to disagree with him.

Instead, I think that the odyssey years are about learning how to make good choices.  It's about distinguishing <em>things</em> from <em>happiness</em> and it's about having the time, money and freedom to figure out what it is that you aspire to.  Thus, what I am doing today and this year is not delay, procrastination or deferment.  Rather this year is far from a delay or a deferment--it is a part of my on going adult odyssey.

The paradigms of adulthood are shifting and expanding and the one thing that I think is safe to say is that the models that defined adulthood for the last fifty years will not be the models that exclusively define my life.  But that does not mean that I am adrift, lost or floating waiting around to turn thirty and to become an adult. I am an adult.  A twenty-something adult.  I am living, exploring and adventuring in a foreign country and this is a choice that I would make again in a heartbeat.