the point is that i'm starting to see a dichotomy in my designated peer group between adults and kids. when i was in high school, of course, everyone acted like a kid, or at best like a kid trying to act like an adult. you know the type. in college, i get the sense that there were many people acting like adults, but these were people who i never would have come into contact with in any relevant context, so it wasn't really food for thought. i guess the point is that i ruled those people out as friends for other (correlated, of course) reasons.
now it's kind of a different ball game. you have people who are clearly adults, and who act like adults, and have natural adult conversations. and then you have ... i guess kids isn't quite right, but i guess people who aren't acting like adults. i've decided that the fatal flaw of adulthood is having predictable conversations, and that maybe the social awkwardness that we all feel and get over isn't such a bad thing.
right now the biggest problem in my life is a pervasive feeling of deja vu, that nothing incredibly new is happening. but i think this would be exacerbated by my being an adult (although it might, in fact, be leading to that; it's hard to see where this road is going.)
i was talking to people today about my goals in life, or more specifically my goals in conversation. somewhere around when i came out to berkeley -- maybe a bit later -- i changed from wanting to have people like me to wanting to make other people happy. i'm not saying this well; i guess what i mean is that i try to say things that provoke thought in other people, and that provoke reality in other people. i want to find out who people are, and the best way to do that is to confront them with novel situations. sort of like what an iq test is supposed to be in theory; i don't care about people's facades or "game faces," and i feel that i can learn a lot more about someone by how they respond to something off-the-wall.
the net result of this, of course, is that i get dismissed as a novelty by a lot of people, which is fine because in general the people doing the dismissing aren't people i'm really going to be friends with anyway. (or thus is the rationalization; i know a lot of my friends are people who dismissed me at first and then grew to like me.) but at worst i give people stories to tell. i give people active symbols in their mind to deal with, and i idealistically hope that people like doing this, like thought-provoking, change-provoking experiences.
as i mentioned before, this is part of the adult-kid dichotomy, that adults in general don't look for life-changing events, whereas kids cast the net much wider. (an example that will fit nicely into this synopsis of the evening is that kids seem to have no qualms about wading into intolerably cold water, such as what we get up here.) but there's a bit more to it than that; i guess the point is that adults already have conversation strategies, whereas kids are still trying to develop these and thus are more inherently unpredictable and variegated.
i don't know where this is headed. i don't know if i'm going to become an adult some day, and i don't know if it would make me happier or not. i guess that's why we bother to live life.