I’m too old to be fooling around with a woman while still wearing socks, but before I explain that, let me give you some background.
After graduating from college, I spent the better part of a year wandering: Wyoming, Vancouver, Oregon, L.A., Arizona, Texas, New Orleans. Eventually, when I ran out of money I decided to move to Chicago — not for any particular reason, but simply because I felt that moving to Chicago was an adult thing to do. Previously the most adult thing I had done was to cut the retort “That’s what she said” out of my vocabulary (at least during first dates and funerals).
I felt like I needed to grow up, and I guess I thought living in a big city, taking the train to work every day and wearing a tie would somehow act as a catalyst to adulthood. I would leapfrog over any growing pains and quickly find myself a true grown-up rather than an overstimulated, foul-mouthed adolescent whose goals in life revolve entirely around alcohol and women.
In my short time as a freshly minted Chicagoan, however, I have not advanced one iota further into adulthood and have probably regressed a whole bunch.
This is partly because of my living situation, which involves five single guys crammed into a dumpy house in central Lakeview. This is the kind of house where instead of cleaning the mildew on the shower curtain, you simply give it a name and consider it a domesticated pet. It’s the kind of house where you can walk downstairs at 4 a.m. and find a dude playing Guitar Hero in his underwear with an open beer and a bowl of cereal nearby.
This kind of adultolescence seems fairly typical of the young, urban college graduate suddenly thrust into the “real” world.
As a matter of fact, I bet there are a few of you who are familiar with the notion I carry that I am a complete phony playing dress-up in a world of people who know what they’re doing. Every weekday I find myself on the Brown Line trying to look professional while passing the time by ranking my fellow passengers in terms of do-ability and wondering what the hell a “portfolio” is and why it must be “diversified.”
So how does one become an adult? From what I can determine, adulthood will occur sometime around the time when my gut becomes just big enough that I decide to marry the woman I’m seeing at the time, before she figures out that I’m about to completely let myself go. This, of course, will mean maturing more out of fear than genuine emotional and philosophical development.
The entire process of going from a hedonistic, sex-crazed adolescent to a serious, contemplative adult — who knows more about the stock market than 2Pac lyrics and no longer considers a bare mattress on the floor an appropriate place to take a lady for a date — remains a complete, gaping mystery to me, as it does many of us.
Which brings me to the socks. This is pretty much the only simple, one-step, sure-fire method to feeling more mature: When fooling around with the opposite (or same) sex, take your socks off. There is nothing that reeks more of furtive, unsatisfying college-age sexual activity than advancing past first base with your socks on.
This is the one facet of our lives over which we all have complete control. If like me, you’re still at the beginning of your journey to maturity and responsibility, you can take solace in the baby steps, in hard-won accomplishments, however minor they may be. There is a reward, even in something so small.
Which, I’m ashamed to say, is totally what she said.
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