Restaurant Meme

Melanie’s tagged me with this restaurant meme. I don’t want to disappoint her but there just aren’t five ‘restaurants’ around here. This is the country–seriously rural. ‘

Sorry about that.

Lag Time

Sometimes I get a hit from a search and it sparks up my writing wheel. Today its this one:

‘How do you know when you’ve grown up?’

Someone, somewhere was curious enough about this to spend the time to type it into a search engine and then filter through all the 1.2 million hits or whatever and then clicked on Unbound at some point. It’s a miracle, first of all, that anyone can find anything with all the websites that are out there.

And besides it a good question the answer to which a great number of Americans have never found the answer. ‘How do you know when you’ve grown up?’

In America a person is ‘chronologically’ grown up when they’re old enough to vote, file with selective service or serve in the military, and be held responsible for the other civic duties like jury duty, etc. This age is eighteen and you are technically ‘grown up’ at that point whether you like it or not, whether you are or not. You’ve had long enough. High School is over though that’s not likely to have prepared you very well for adult hood and legally its time to assume your adult responsibilities.

Actual maturity takes some time and some living and it varies by person. J.R.R. Tolkein explains to us that Hobbits matured at around 35 but they lived longer and didn’t have to worry about car insurance. I’ve known some solemn ten year olds who were more mature than a good number of ‘grown-ups’. Physical maturity means, pretty well, that your body has reached its adult stature and function. Emotional and mental maturity?

Sometimes that one lags a bit.