on aging.

I don't like making posts just because I want to share links, but I'll bite the bullet here.

This post, and the article it concerns are both superb.

I'd been having a couple of conversations about "protracted adolescence" with my dad lately, but whatever I said was bullshit. These two pieces are what I meant to say, or what I should have meant to say. As a creeping-toward-30 American living in Tokyo, it seems almost like there is no other mode of existence but the "grup" way. I've met the woman who quit her high paying job to do something more fun, the 30 somethings who buy $500 jeans, the douglas coupland characters who revel in their own shallowness (here I cough in a way that sounds conspicuously like "myself"), all of the people who can't even imagine marriage. Toyko's not just full of these people, it manufactures them.

Here's my hangup though. Even if I am one of these people, and I live in the global epicenter of these people, I have one big reservation on the whole thing. This grup lifestyle is just what I'm doing because I haven't found a way to earn enough money to abandon it. I wanna be rich. I don't mind getting up at 5:30am if it means 50% more money. Hell, I look good in a nice suit, and I find them more comfortable and more "me" than the ubiquitous shredded jeans.