Tell Me I Won't Be Like That When I'm Older

or, If I Can't Be a Petulant Teenager Any More, It's Time to Switch to Disdainful College Student Mode

If anything about the internet has changed the way I approach conversations, perhaps it is the infrequency with which we mention the weather. With a million websites at my fingertips, why would I hail a friend with a comment on how the clouds look, when I could start things off with a discussion of the geographic distribution of idiomatic expressions for sunshowers, a news article, a link to an MIT student's presentation of a urinal-based video game, or a music file I'd been meaning to share. I have high expectations for small talk these days, I guess. A greeting that involves comment on the weather, once the most typical of any and all conversation filler, carries a hint of that same awkwardness one feels when frozen beneath the shears of the garrulous hair stylist who wants to know where you go to school and whether you're enjoying it and do you miss your family and what do you study and hasn't it been just dreadful out lately; anything that doesn't put any strain on the edges of the day-to-day world.

My mother and her family adore stories, both written and oral, that remind them of some real or invented oversimplified truth about what life is like. (Such stories often involve the witty observations of small children, the thoughtful musings of a middle-aged naturalist, or the traveler lost in a foreign land who stumbles across unexpected kindness that bridges language and cultural barriers.) They like to share these with me, and though I do not claim that such things have no value, I get done reading or listening and find myself both unmoved and a bit resentful at having wasted my time. I'm sick of hearing about the commonality of the human experience. Show me something I haven't seen, for god's sake; take some interest in the unfamiliar. (And I don't mean a sudden crop-up of accidents on Columbia Road.) It's as valid a truth as your kiddie malapropisms, and a damned lot more interesting.

It's strange, spending so little time around people my own age again. I hope that I never get so old that I lose interest in learning more languages, reading real literature or scientific articles, or researching weird stuff. And I hope that I have people around who feel the same.