On Adulthood

I don't necessarily think being an adult comes from "having responsibilities" or "having your shit together" or having "stopped doing childish things." (Because I haven't really achieved any of those.) I feel that I began to become an adult when I began to have an "inner life," and I credit reaching a certain level of literacy for that. Having the faculties to read adult society's newspapers and magazines, to watch the news, to read "real" books that weren't for kids. To understand them, to form my own opinions, to leave the mental garden of childhood.

The internet was a revolution. We were the first generation to use it to help us grow up. I felt like I was becoming a citizen, with all the meanings that word entails. I could begin developing my own philosophy and outlook, as opposed to having parents or teachers tell me what they should be. I think that was a big part of being an adult. Posting on the Mobius Forum.  It was the first time I was able to have people talk TO me as opposed to talking AT me the way adults do with a child. MoFo was anonymous, where no one had to know my age, education, race, sex, class. It was a place to simply develop a life of the mind at a time when otherwise a kid isn't considered a real person, but sort of an extension of their parents.

Obviously life is a continuous progression, nobody blooms overnight. But I do think, among many many other things, that that was the start of it.

Also, I think of adulthood not necessarily as maturity, but as agency and freedom.

• College was where I finally met warm, kind and funny people who were real peers in both an intellectual and emotional sense. (You have no idea how happy I was to be out of high school and all its shallow retardedness, lawl.) 
• Going from riding a bike, to figuring out the bus and subway routes, to learning to drive and literally expanding the physical boundaries of my world. 
• Entering an adult relationship where the love was deep and reciprocated and getting engaged so we're socially acknowledged as a household. 
• Getting my own apartment where I felt it was really, finally, a home to call my own. I could decide what there was to eat, what the furniture was, who got to come over, what events I could plan. I was the first of my friends with my own apartment, so my social circle started to revolve around My Place. It's pretty awesome. 

All the transition points where I felt I became more adult have to do with agency. If anything, responsibility and boring-ness makes me feel more like a child. Adulthood isn't about going to work and paying bills, where you have to do arbitrary menial things because someone told you to, where you have to wear uncomfortable clothes and be on your best behavior, where people dictate your schedule and where you're embarrassed of the things that make you truly who you are.

Anthropologies of Age

I unearthed a rather thought provoking blog while on a rather mundane google search of "panda names."

I think this is someone I'd like to meet, though of course because meeting people from the internet is creepy, someone I'd like to meet in a strictly neutral, strictly hypothetical non-threatening pocket dimension, free of the dual burdens of awkwardness and judgmentalism.

The quality of thought changes when you know you actually could meet someone, someone who's not just a nebulous text-spawning "person on the internet." If I went out and took Metro lines so and so, I could meet him... You know when something is "based on a true story," it's a better story? And so it is.

I think he's smarter than me also. Not smarter necessarily IQ-wise (I couldn't judge, but I wouldn't be surprised) but just in the "Oh, I never thought of that," category, a certain level of self-awareness. Maybe this is the difference between old people and young people, what "maturity" is. (Asking me to define "maturity" is like ... well... Blind people don't dream in color, from what I've heard. When people who are born blind are asked, "Do you wish you could see?" they say, "How could I wish it, when I've never known it?") It's only a theory I have; my actual contact with people outside my age group is rare. More anthropological fieldwork on my part must be done.

Unfortunately, whenever I talk to anyone older than me, it's within a hierarchical context: parents, relatives, teachers, bosses, "superiors"¹ even informally. In the case of the blog, I have spontaneously been handed the revelations, stripped of formality and rank, of someone older than me, but not old enough to be "old." You can tell, I think, just from the writing style- reading things by people older than you is like dropping a pebble into a deep pool, watching it sink, and watching the ripples. I can't explain why. It just is.

When I was younger, and my parents kept using the "when you're more mature" line on me, I thought rebelliously that, surely the consciousness of a twenty year old and the consciousness of a forty year old were similar? Your IQ does not improve so much after a certain age. If education were the issue, then a ten year-old public school American brat would be more "mature" than an 80 year old peasant from a third world country. It's not so much about family status and responsibility either- there are thirteen year-old wives and avowed bachelors to the grave. Between age 10 and age 20 a person goes through revelations of seismic magnitude, and compared to that, I didn't think the mental difference between someone, say 25, and 45 was a difference in "maturity" so much as a difference in physiological, economic, social conditions.

That was a theory, and theories can be disproved.

I know I am smarter now than when I was twelve. Smarter than when I was eighteen. How it happened and the nature of this "wisdom" is a mystery. At any age, you dwell within your consciousness. All of the world, for its great size, can be encompassed inside my head, and vast as the universe is, it cannot be bigger than my mind.

So. I enjoy watching thoughts bloom...

Sorry for the two philosophy-babble posts in a row.

¹ Except for lower-class adults. Un-PC, but true. Consider: My boss is "Dr. Mitch." The janitors at Harbor are "Sheila and Lynette." My dentist is "Dr. Miyamoto." My school bus driver was "Bobby." The esteemed culinary expert cum tv celebrity is (the honorable) "Iron Chef Kenichi." The food services employee working the dining hall cashier is "Valerie." Us young'ns are taught to address adults (I'm a "college girl," emphasis on "girl," hence not a "real" adult) as superiors, but if forms of address have any social implication, then what am I to think? I still find addressing adults by first name abhorrent. Sometimes I will call the janitor "Ms. Sheila."