My ascension into adulthood has been a little uneven.
When I was a kid, I had this whole list of things I could not imagine enjoying. Things like watching the news, listening to classical music and reading books that didn't have Spider-Man in them. The earthy flavor of vegetables used to make me gag. My first sip of beer tasted like carbonated earwax.
And then, one by one, sometimes without me even noticing, all of these things have become okay. There are still some that have yet to kick in.
There is a dirty joke I didn't understand when I was a kid which I tucked away in my memory, waiting for the appropriate piece of adult information to unlock it. And while I don't imagine that I'm aware of everything that people do to each other, I think my searchlight has passed over pretty much everything that a typical late-seventies elementary school kid would know to joke about. It's weird to imagine that there is something in that sweaty landscape that I've missed, but which pre-internet tweens understood forty years ago.
I was also expecting to become interested in sports at some point. I thought I was on the cusp of getting into baseball for a few years in the early nineties, I watched that whole Ken Burns documentary and everything. Being a sports fan still feels like an adult thing to me. Even if involves so much in terms of face paint and foam hats.
It's only been a recent thing for me to admit I don't know anything about sports. Last year, I filled an oxygen tank for this guy. When I was done, he went to make a little small talk and asked me, "Hey, you follow pro ball?"
And I said, "No."
And he said, "Oh. Well then, get out of my house."
And that's literally how that went.
Anyway, there's probably some hope for me yet. Because all of this is to say that just this weekend I willfully and enthusiastically did something which I've never done at any point in my life.
I sharpened the blade on my lawnmower.
And that, in itself, does not make me an adult (by which I mean terrifically old), but the level of excitement I felt beforehand, the knee-buckling satisfaction of having done it and the giddy anticipation of waiting for my grass to dry the next day so I could, as my inner narrator called it, "give 'er a go," all of that certainly opens the topic for discussion.
Of course, this could be it -- the final few yards of my my final developmental runway. There's some comfort in the fact that, at least for the foreseeable future, I'll be mulching like a Mofo.
When I was a kid, I had this whole list of things I could not imagine enjoying. Things like watching the news, listening to classical music and reading books that didn't have Spider-Man in them. The earthy flavor of vegetables used to make me gag. My first sip of beer tasted like carbonated earwax.
And then, one by one, sometimes without me even noticing, all of these things have become okay. There are still some that have yet to kick in.
There is a dirty joke I didn't understand when I was a kid which I tucked away in my memory, waiting for the appropriate piece of adult information to unlock it. And while I don't imagine that I'm aware of everything that people do to each other, I think my searchlight has passed over pretty much everything that a typical late-seventies elementary school kid would know to joke about. It's weird to imagine that there is something in that sweaty landscape that I've missed, but which pre-internet tweens understood forty years ago.
I was also expecting to become interested in sports at some point. I thought I was on the cusp of getting into baseball for a few years in the early nineties, I watched that whole Ken Burns documentary and everything. Being a sports fan still feels like an adult thing to me. Even if involves so much in terms of face paint and foam hats.
It's only been a recent thing for me to admit I don't know anything about sports. Last year, I filled an oxygen tank for this guy. When I was done, he went to make a little small talk and asked me, "Hey, you follow pro ball?"
And I said, "No."
And he said, "Oh. Well then, get out of my house."
And that's literally how that went.
Anyway, there's probably some hope for me yet. Because all of this is to say that just this weekend I willfully and enthusiastically did something which I've never done at any point in my life.
I sharpened the blade on my lawnmower.
And that, in itself, does not make me an adult (by which I mean terrifically old), but the level of excitement I felt beforehand, the knee-buckling satisfaction of having done it and the giddy anticipation of waiting for my grass to dry the next day so I could, as my inner narrator called it, "give 'er a go," all of that certainly opens the topic for discussion.
Of course, this could be it -- the final few yards of my my final developmental runway. There's some comfort in the fact that, at least for the foreseeable future, I'll be mulching like a Mofo.
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