Avoid Boring People (elementary, my dear Watson)

You never stop outgrowing shit. Sometimes it matters and sometimes it just fades out like a radio signal. There’s no heady, explosive epiphany that gets burnt into the pages of your encyclopaedia, no birth, no death, no sirens, no Hallelujah chorus. I couldn’t tell you the precise moment I stopped rapturously sprinting down the Barbie aisle at Toys ‘r’ Us, or thinking that Top 40 radio was worth listening to. Those things were there, and then they weren’t. When you’re a kid, though, you can zip through a rapid-fire succession of dizzy phases and nobody so much as blinks an eye. It’s a lot harder to let go of something that has long outlived its usefulness to you when you’re in your thirties. Eyebrows are raised. You feel obligated to explain yourself. You don’t want to confuse or inconvenience anyone.

I miss the old days. I miss announcing that I now wished to marry Ralph Macchio instead of John Schneider, taping a new Tiger Beat centerfold to my bedroom ceiling, and just assuming that everyone around me would figure out a way to deal with it. I long for that kind of freedom again.

Good manners can feel like a prison sentence.