Saturday, June 17, 2006

Advantages of Being A Grown-Up

Today:
Sleeping in till 1:30pm
Eating two desserts and an ice blended coffee for my afternoon snack
Watching as much E True Hollywood Stories as I want on a Saturday afternoon

Last night, I joined some old college friends for an evening of delicious fried chicken at Honey's Kettle Fried Chicken and dancing at Firecracker in Chinatown. The fried chicken was awesome of course. And Firecracker has gotten quite diverse in its crowds since I went years ago before the huge revival of Chinatown. We enjoyed some jazz downstairs, some dancing upstairs, and when we were ready to call it a night...a bunch of obnoxious drunk people sat down at our table for some conversation. They were friends with one of the girls in our group and relatively harmless.
As we yawned and tried to find a polite way to exit, Girlsnob pointed out the guy next to her and said something like "this guy is into glowsticking," got up, and walked to the side of the table to talk to her boyfriend, indicating that she was ready to leave. I got up and followed suit, as did Hungry Monster, leaving the other 2 girls still at the table with the hooligans. I asked if we should rescue Misocrazy but HM thought she didn't need rescuing. Girlsnob looked at us and said "one of the best things about growing up is being able to say... whatever comes to mind."
Though I don't think she meant spewing out any and all thoughts without filtering, it really got me thinking. The whole time I had thought growing up meant learning to hold your tongue. For years, I naively opened my mouth to share whatever thought or opinion that popped into my head, inadvertently offending people and causing misunderstandings left and right. And for years, I didn't even realize I was doing it. Friends who knew me shrugged it off and figured "That's just her. She says things. She means no harm." It was a tough thing to realize and rectify.
Now that we're out of our twenties, does that mean I can regress? Can I go back to not caring and saying whatever I damn well feel like? Because THAT would be a wonderful advantage of being a grown-up.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

the advantage and disadvantage of being a grown-up is being more fully aware of our words and actions. rather than saying "whatever comes to mind," my style is to be as honest as possible while, like gnarls barkely says, trying to "think twice" about saying shit with intention to be hurtful or mean. oh wait, unless we're gossiping, in which case all bets are off.