You Can't Stop Progress

I really don't consider myself much of an adult. Granted, I am starting to get wrinkles, I don't rebound from debauchery the way I once did and 18 year olds think I am someone to be mocked as opposed to emulated. But there seem to be subtle suggestions that I might be slowly but surely entering adulthood. For instance, I recently bought a toiler paper holder. There I said. I bought it. And I even went to Bed, Bath & Beyond to buy it. I... get this... intended to buy it. A plastic and metal cylindar designed to store and hide in plain sight three additional rolls of toilet paper besides the one already available to the bathroom user on the dispenser. I got in my car. Turned the key. Got on the road. And walked through the door of Bed, Bath & Beyond with one thing on my list - toilet paper holder.

There is a book called The Tipping Point which I am sure you have heard of but if you haven't it examines how trends begin and reach critical mass. When they really explode is what is called the tipping point. I think that adulthood for a guy has a tipping point. It occurs when you voluntarily enter a Pottery Barn as opposed to being coerced by someone... most likely someone you are trying to nail. Or at least see naked. Without paying them for that. And love.

I've always considered myself to have some level of design-conciousness. When I was a kid I liked giant japanese robots with swords. Then I got into D&D. Then I collected comics. OK. I was a geek growing up. In fact, I used to were the same colored shirt everyday in the eight grade. My friends called me "Blue Shirt". I convinced myself it was a style choice, but frankly money was tight and blue pinpoint oxford short sleeved shirts were inexpensive. But it did give me some indavertant level of stylistic simplicity, allowed me to know at an early age what pinpoint oxford was and, most importantly, reinforced my geekdom.

In High School, I was able to start shedding my outward geek tendencies even though I harbored geek tendencies internally. (I closet collected transformers in the ninth grade - seriously) Eventually in college I came into my own and found some measure of style by working in a hip clothing store. So again, I had an external presentation of cool. And at that point 18 year olds thought I was cool. They even said so. And I could date them without looking like a pedophile. Finally I was spurt out of the college system into the adult world which at that point means that you start in what some of us call "the working world".

And therein lies the rub. I am supposed to be an adult but if a FBI profiler went to my apartment, they would conclude that it was occupied by a kid. Mismatched furniture. Black furniture. Sheets under 500 thread count. Non-natural fibers. So you could really say that while I was maintaining the appearance of an adult, the lair was giving me away. And it was like that through most of my twenties.

Then it occurred. Not sure when. But it did. I walked past a Pottery Barn and as opposed to being deflected like an up-quark in a partical collider... I walked in. Not only did I walk in... I liked it. All of it. The furniture. The window treaments (I didn't know that phrase before Pottery Barn). The candles. All of it. And thus began a subtle transformation wherein one externally presented adult was becoming and internally registered adult.

So it began with pottery barn and then led to overstock.com then to me getting in my car to go buy a toilet paper holder at Bed, Bath & Beyond. And as I was walking in the store I walked past a group of 18 year olds and as they looked at me in what I interpreted as an internally mocking manner I thought, "Dude, pull up your pants."