To an objective onlooker, it would seem that I am turning into an old man.
Don’t get me wrong, my wardrobe, in response to nearly eight weeks of indentured servitude in the foreign policy community, resembles that of a misguided eighth grader/rave hooligan (I don’t know which is worse). My sense of direction and time is still shamefully remedial, and my hair doesn’t stay one color for more than a few weeks (though these are all signs that I might be turning into a southern Californian).
Nevertheless, small clues have been alluding to the fact that, for some time now, I have gradually but steadily been slipping into responsible adulthood. For example, when I go to punk shows these days, I find myself occupying the outer periphery of the mosh pit, worrying about scuffed shoes, neck trauma, eye strain, beer spillage, broken glasses (or teeth) and shaking my head with scorn/giving the “are you serious?!” look in the direction of the occasional jubilant fan. It seems that those halcyon days of flagrant disregard for the safety of myself and others have been indefinitely effaced by cries of “geezer” and “pops” from the just-post-pubescent crowds at Nation and 9:30.
Further evidence: It has been at least a year since I have stolen a stop sign, defaced a luxury sedan, mixed alcohols, huffed paint, run from the police, forged federal documents, doubled the speed limit or thrown rocks at oncoming traffic. Just last week I shied from the opportunity to hop chain link fence and evade security in order to avoid paying at the Warped Tour, even when the opportunity presented itself. A goddamned disgrace any way you cut the cake. Yes, I am getting soft.
Added to which indignity, I find little reminders of my impending adulthood everyday. The internship set knows that pain of daily suit and ties as well as anyone else. But those internships only last a few weeks; it’s the seemingly innocuous stuff that poses the real threat. Example: picking up dry cleaning. When did this start happening? Paying the phone bill? Obscene. Going to bed before four on a weeknight? Unbelievable. These are all seemingly trivial and mundane examples, true, yet they underscore a gradual shift in the college being that is marked by living alone, going to work, paying the rent, fretting over wardrobe and groceries and taxes and window dressings and appliances and all that other shite that we couldn’t be bothered by just months, if not weeks ago.
The only saving grace is that I actually don’t feel grown up in the slightest. Despite these seemingly glaring outside indicators of my relative maturity level, I feel (as noted) more and more like a blinky, disoriented resident of LA/Boulder than ever before. The only possible explanations have shattered my sense of linearity as never before.
You see, I assumed that once I turned 18 and headed off to school an invisible threshold would be crossed, beyond which maturity, responsibility and self-awareness would become status quo. Not so. I’m not even going to get into the details of my 18th birthday or the first year of school, but suffice it to say that the threshold has been pushed back to 21, or maybe even 30. Remember, externally, the signs indicate that I (all of us maybe) are growing more mature as we have the day-to-day minutae to attend to, but on the whole, I feel less desire than ever to enter the bleak world of cubicles, profit margins and corn-flower blue ties.
Possible explanations are myriad. I first speculated that perhaps life and maturity function like a Zarathustran parabola: We mature to a certain apex, each at our own pace, and then we begin the slippery slope back down that lands us in enlightenment or senility. This is evidenced by the fortysomethings who come into my restaurant and tend to be more of a public disturbance and create more of a mess than their children. Just this weekend I had to remove the S’mores platter from a table where the parents were lighting paper on fire and poking people with the skewers. The five-year-old gave me a knowing head shake/sigh and motioned for me to “just take it away.”
Of course, it is possible that these people, like many other adults, never actually became functioning, “mature” members of society. This, of course, skews the “ascent/descent” theory, but opened the door to my second realization that indeed, some people never do reach that bored, hollow, routinized maturity that we are taught to hold so dear. Conversely, I already have met many people here who seemed to have started as grown ups and haven’t been a kid for a day in their lives. Hello six-figure salary and Mercedes Benz. Enjoy the ride.
In any event it seems clear now that growing up isn’t necessarily an attendant byproduct of clearing a birthday, coming to Georgetown for the first time, graduating or even entering “the real world.” Now we insert the tested truism that age is a state of mind and find that it is remarkably true, which is far too easy to forget around these parts.
This isn’t to say that one should live like a hooligan or let day-to-day obligations go unattended. Indeed, in my case, moderation seems to be slightly healthier option. If there is one lesson imparted to me by this past summer, however, it is that life around here, and probably out there in that amorphous “real world” is about 1000 percent more livable when I just drop the pretense and let go. How’s that for pedantic? Just don’t be surprised the next time you’re missing a stop sign.
Ian Bourland is a junior in the School of Foreign Service and an associate editor of The Georgetown Voice. Like a fine wine, he improves with age.
