I earned this particular brand of teasing at around 13 by wearing old lady sweaters, carrying around a bible and my embroidery, and disapproving strongly of swear words.
The peak of awfulness in the Age of the Old Lady Sweater. Second from the left. I then proceeded to make matters worse by getting married at 19, and then by becoming the innkeeper at a bed and breakfast. Shedding the sweaters and the bible helped a little. Swearing helped a little more. But I was still old and out of touch with my age group.
After Josh and I split up in August, it really hit me how fucking old I was. I decided to push myself to get out there, meet people, date, try new things...to act my age, in other words.
Wilderness pilates is, of course, on the list. I think it's required. I have been overall fairly successful so far. I'm going out, building up my alcohol tolerance, dating, making friends, getting laid (rarely, but I'll take what I can get at this point), living in the city, going on spur-of-the-moment international trips, wandering all over town, and generally being quite adventurous and spontaneous.
But I'm thinking there's still some amount of old lady in me, because I just can't get over a few irritating things about 20-something culture and social norms.
-There's no such thing as a set plan. Neither spontaneous nor predetermined plans seem to be ever set in stone, and you must always have a plan B because your chances of being bailed on are quite high. At first you will start to question whether anyone really loves you or wants to be around you, because your self-esteem clearly still needs some work, but really it's just that people do whatever they feel like doing at any given moment and have little to no respect for plans of any kind.
-No one shows up anywhere on time. And by that I mean that standard arrival time is 30-60 minutes late, and anytime within 2 hours seems to be acceptable. I had always thought that "fashionably late" was 15-30 minutes after the party had started. I didn't think it meant that you show up at 10:30 when you said you'd meet someone around 9:00.
-People don't introduce one another. That may be an old-fashioned bit of etiquette, but I've always thought it made a lot of sense. It's really awkward to be the friend sitting there while the whole "Omg Helen! How are you? How's Frank? You broke up?? Emma's engaged, really? I thought she'd sleep around until she was 35 at least. How's your new job?" thing goes on without having been introduced to Helen. Even though you still don't know Helen or Frank or Emma and therefore will still be more or less excluded from the conversation, you at least know that your job is to smile and nod along politely and to say "nice to meet you, Helen" when she finally leaves. If your friend just turns around and ignores you for some random stranger named Helen for 5 minutes, you don't know whether to try to pretend you're participating in their conversation, or to stare at your lap, or to pretend to go to the bathroom...and if you're already a little socially awkward, it just escalates into a panic attack.
I'm sure there's more, but that's all I have at the moment.
I think it's also important to note that I could have included SO many memes in this post, but I didn't. For you guys. You're welcome.
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