not *that* kind of adult content

[mrissa]

Apparently livejournal is progressing towards the day when everyone I've ever met has an lj account, except for my mom. This is not wholly a bad thing, but I'm not sure it's wholly a good one, either. I should be used to the idea that people will go on knowing each other without me -- all fandom is one, or something like that. And when it's fandom, I'm better with it. It's just when it's people I know from totally different places popping up knowing each other that I start to get a little freaked.

I am bouncing off things lately. Skimming along and then bouncing off, and I hope it rights itself soon, because it's pretty annoying. I pulled up a short story to try to trick my brain into doing something focused for awhile. I hope it works. I've also been cropping the remainder of my Christmas and New Year's pictures. Better late than never, and all that...not a project requiring great focus. So those should be up at novel_gazing in not too long.

Lo these two moons ago someone asked me my impressions of adulthood. Right this moment my impression is that it is vastly overrated, but that is a temporary impression and will soon pass. I hope.

This person also asked when I first began to feel like an adult. I think it was when I was 10 and I wanted to go home from church camp. The camp counselor started crying about how she was a miserable failure as a counselor, and I sat down with her and rubbed her back and told her that it wasn't her fault, she'd done the best she could and I was just fine, I just wasn't a camp person, and it was best for people to know their own temperaments. And she stopped crying and blinked at me and said, "Are you ten or forty?" And at that point I started thinking more about controlling the havoc I wreaked, paying attention to my effects on other people. Some of that is taking care of people, but some of it was also having calculated effects on people, which can be exactly the opposite. But it's along the lines of a gentleman never offending on purpose, I think. Not the only component of maturity, but one of them.

But that was just the start of feeling like an adult. Feeling like an adult really stuck when I was 21 and we were living in that little hell-hole apartment in Concord, and ants got into the kitchen utensils drawer. There were swarms and swarms of them, and they were disgusting, and the ant spray we had then made me feel sick, and I was just furious. I felt invaded and dirty. And so I was standing there crying furiously, but I was washing out the utensil drawer and all the utensils anyway, and it didn't occur to me to ask someone else to do it. And I thought, well, shit, I'm an adult now. The ant corpses stop here. When something is disgusting and horrible, not only do I have to deal with it, I have to deal with it without someone telling me to. Because at my parents' house, if there was mold in my shower, if there were spiders in the downstairs family room, my mom was perfectly capable of telling me, "Well, deal with it!" if I went howling upstairs going, "MO-OMMMMMM!" But there was someone to go howling upstairs to, and ultimately it was her house and her mold or her spiders or whatever. And with the ants, they were mine. Being an adult didn't mean I couldn't be upset at the invasion of my living space. It just meant that I couldn't let being upset interfere with dealing with the problem.

I think one of the hard bits for me was that a lot of things that are generally thought of as adult things were with me early, and I knew I wasn't an adult just because of them. Making serious life choices consciously and following through on them -- I did that very early. I was saying earlier this week that having total control of who saw my fiction never left the top three motivating factors in my life until after I turned 20. From the time I was 5 or 6 at least, it was always up there. Now I know that the goal is to have things published, and you can never totally control access to a published work. But when I was younger that was terrifying. I learned runic alphabets specifically for the purposes of being able to write fiction in class without the risk of anyone reading it over my shoulder or grabbing my notebooks away from me. I got to be as fast in three or four runic alphabets as I was printing. (I almost never write fiction in cursive. Never have. Don't know why.) But anyway, point being, I was very serious about this stuff very early, and maybe being serious about your work is one of the things that ought to make you count as more of an adult, but often it didn't, at least not externally. I knew the physical stuff wasn't all there was, because I was a very early bloomer physically, but clearly it meant something or serious work would have meant more. So that was confusing.

I probably have something more interesting to say about grown-up stuff, but not tonight.

Comments

Thank you for sharing that with us

[mackatlaw.livejournal.com]

I remember notebooks I wrote in elementary school that I shared with a few people, and stopped after that for years. What they said was probably positive, not negative, yet I can't remember specifics or why I stopped keeping those books.

I've been torn between "you can't see that" and "please read me" for a while. If I don't want people to ever see things or finish them, why not keep them in my head? Yet having people hear me be honest is scary, no matter the type of writing.

I'm not sure when I felt like an adult. I'd say it's when I accepted my own (eventual) death and mortality, but I don't know if I have.

Sorry, I just finished revising "Requiem Mass," and am not quite out of that headspace. But err, I found your piece on adulthood to be very affirming. Maybe becoming an adult is an ongoing process?

Re: Thank you for sharing that with us

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I'm sure that maturing is an ongoing process -- or at least it ought to be -- but I'm wary of the sliding scale of adulthood, because in my experience it's used unfortunately often to declare that people who disagree with oneself are not real adults.

Adulthood

[mackatlaw.livejournal.com]

I'm still working on feeling like an adult, where my view of an adult and society's view can coexist. I want to be able to be serious enough in front of clients, and light-hearted enough able to play with little kids at church. I see no reason why the two can't coexist...

Re: Adulthood

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think people who don't feel they can play with children because it is insufficiently "serious" are definitely not more adult than those who can.

Not that all adults must enjoy children. Just that the "seriousness" of it is really beside the point.

I would say that what you want with clients is situational professionalism, not inherent seriousness. It's not that you want them to believe you never, ever make goofy faces -- it's that you want them to know that you know not to do it in front of a judge etc.

Re: Adulthood

[mackatlaw.livejournal.com]

I wanted to say thank you for your response here. You described what I am looking for: the ability to be professional, not staid. It helped me form some of my thinking.

Mack

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

I think one of the weirdest things about friendster isn't how many total strangers I should know because you know, we have 18 people in common, etc. It's when I find someone on it I didn't know was there--random boys I remember from years ago--and finding that not only are they on Friendster, but we already have a line of connection between us through unsuspected paths. And it's not like it's something that's weird when I think about it--I have several people from Oberlin on my friends list, and they seem to have an inside track on knowing hippies in boston, and all those other hippies went to school with other people, and so on and so forth. But it's still just *weird* to me.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah. For me the key word is more "geeks" than "hippies," but it's the same problem.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I thought gentlement neve offended by *accident*?

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

That's more or less my experience - through a chain of events too complicated to relate here, I know one of the owners of Tesco, and I can assure you that he is both A) a classic British gentleman, and B) more than capable of giving offense to anyone who annoys him.