The alternative is to be pitiful, or dead.

[bironic]

Cary Tennis over at Salon.com offered more brilliant advice today in response to a letter entitled, "I'm 28. How do I grow up?" The advice-seeker described the difficulty she's having in moving forward with serious relationships and the lifestyle she's crafted for herself. These were my favorite parts of Cary's reply (the second paragraph especially):

What I would say to you about adulthood, to liberate you, is that certain actions are just actions, not gestures. [...] When the roof leaks and you get a new roof put on, that is not symbolic of middle-class existence. That is keeping the rain out. So I speculate that for your generation, schooled in postmodernism, part of moving out of the postmodern maze, which contains in its complexities many cruel intellectual traps, is learning to see action simply as action, not as gesture. You are not your iPod. You are not your pants.

...I continue to believe that understanding the death of modernism and the power of postmodernism to shape how we perceive the world is key to making decisions about adulthood. You have to learn to see how you are seeing in order to recognize how you are constructing what you are seeing.

Do we not stand in awe?

Comments

[bironic.livejournal.com]

Then you perhaps have deeper issues than needing to separate modern and postmodern approaches to the world.

Are we on for Sunday or holding out for Nefertiti?

[catilinarian.livejournal.com]

You can't be your pants, for alas, becoming an adult means giving up forever the carefree life of pants.

*sniff*