What do I need to know to be a Proper Grown Up?

craner said:

I've been trying to become a genuine grown up ever since I met you, Luke. Before that, in fact. Actually, as it happens, a few weeks before I met you I was more of a grown up than a few weeks after I met you. Basically, all of the various things I've tried, avoid doing, as they won't work, or don't work. Don't try to exist purely on Bulgarian wine and Gauloises. Don't stay in a permanent job fo years constantly applying for promotions. Don't join a political party. Don't learn to drive. Don't pontificate and pose with Jews in Hendon or Arabs in Kensington. Don't attend Latin Mass. Don't read Anthony Powell or Michael Oakeshott or The Federalist Papers. Don't listen to Sidney Bechet or Django Reinhardt. Don't hold fancy seafood parties. Don't hold fancy seafood parties to a soundtrack of Sidney Bechet or Django Reinhardt, while discussing Anthony Powell with a Jew from Hendon and some Arabs from Kensington. Don't take out any subscriptions to any magazines. Don't try to become a teacher, or a lawyer. None of these things work or even make you look like an adult. Somehow, for some reason, some people grow up and settle down with kids and family by 30 or 35 as if it's the easiest and most obvious thing in the world, and they're a class apart; those who then sustain this incredible winning streak through their whole lives are marvels of Western Civ. -- they are also the ones to set and exemplify a template, a template the rest of us vainly try to emulate or achieve, or (with difficulty/bloody defiance) ignore. I am one of the doomed aspirers. I always wanted to conform to the idea of adulthood -- I liked the idea of adulthood in that whole boozy-breathed, broadsheet-reading, complicated-love-life Mad Men sort of way before Mad Men was ever broadcast or conceived. Being a kid is good while it's happening, being a teenager is miserable and exciting in equal measure: but a 30-year old dressing like a teenager or going to rock festivals or earnestly discussing a new Sugababes song struck me, at 25, as being the most shit, most embarrassing thing possible --and that was just as the Noughties was getting into full-swing, and the 30-something teens were swinging their prams around Victoria Park and what have you. I'm not saying I was right, mind you: the bogus "adult" pose was equally absurd. I'm the sort of tragic loser who's been trying to conform for years and constantly falling short, or getting it wrong, or being exposed as a fraud or an eccentric or a dreamer or a drunk or odd or antisocial. I have had some heroic failures, but they are not the sort of thing you boast about. I am the classic entry-ist who mostly can't enter, or gets in only to get kicked out again as soon as anybody recognises me. You don't even have the appetite to approach the door, Luka Vandross. I don't believe you are serious.

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