I wasn’t going to blog again until Marika 2 was out of the oven (currently at paragraph three, I believe!) but after all, rules are made to be broken, and the ones you make yourself you can pre-forgive yourself for breaking.

SO. I was reading a fawbulous book my fawbulous sister gave me, and it was very late at night, and I decided I wanted to see if I could install Starcraft on my Mac, and, if so, play it for a bitsy.

A little inner voice said “Irresponsible!” (okay, so it’s not little and she sings it to the tune of “Under-standable” in ‘Both Reached for the Gun’ in Chicago). And that’s when a little phrase my sister introduced to me came in handy: I’m an adult, and I can do what I want! Now, of course, there are limits to the scope and applicability of this, but I felt a great weight lift as I plugged in my laptop, and I realized, being an adult is freeing.

I don’t know about YOU, but when I was little, I REALLY didn’t want to grow up, no way, unh unh, no sir. And you know, I still don’t want to. Grow up? Up to what? To where? Is the air thin up there? Will the altitude cause strange mutations in me, a calcification of the laugh, an agglomeration of cheap falsities used to interact with others’ pretense? Will pretending life is no fun and behaves according to simple rules really fool anyone, or make life any longer? No.

So why does that word…adult...mean something else? Maybe it did even then. “You might not like coffee, Felicity, it’s an adult taste.” I pretended I liked it, to be adult. It had a frisson of the forbidden; the exotic; the nebulous beauties of life which, like flying cars, would surely materialize in time.

So, everybody, please, don’t grow up. There’s a word for what growing up makes you—I got it from an old Star Trek. Grup. Don’t be a grup. Grups are grey and stiff with should-haves and normals and what-will-the-neighbors-say. Be an adult. Stay up past your bedtime. Buy yourself a present. Order the expensive thing, and get dessert, too. Sing in public. Because no one can tell you not to.

P.S. This blog entry brought to you by SARK. And possibly by ELOISE.