*Tell us how your week went by putting together a playlist of five songs that represent it.*

Thanks to Last.fm, this is going to be a cakewalk. Sometimes I think that my workplace is ruled over by “Lux Aeterna” from Requiem for a Dream. That was definitely a good theme for last week. After that, “Eye In The Sky” by the Alan Parsons Project. Next, “Lets Have A Kiki” by the Scissor Sisters and then rounded out by Billy Joel’s “Allentown” and Gershwin’s “Rhapsody In Blue”.

While I’ve been on my blogging bender this weekend I’ve been writing on my iPad and it’s been playing Spotify’s Classical Radio station. I find writing to classical to be the best experience when I am writing. Plus the iPad (with Drafts!) makes the entire experience all that easier since it’s so light and portable and the bluetooth connected keyboard helps me bridge that gap. I can set up my iPad and type along, listening to music all from one device. No laptop to haul around, just a slim neat iPad with nearly all the tools I need to write. The only thing that the iPad lacks and this is something that irks me, is an “After The Deadline” spell and grammar checking app. I looked and couldn’t find anything so I just spend that much more time in WordPress because they’ve got a working implementation of After The Deadline in the WordPress editor online. It’s not elegant, not by a longshot, but there it is.

*Who’s the most important person in your life — and how would your day-to-day existence be different without them?*

Scott is the most important person in my life. Being my life partner means exactly that. Life. Partner. Best lived together. Where would I be without him? I can’t say. I definitely would be lonelier and sadder and probably less passionate about things in general without him. I look across the way at our two valentines day cards standing on the coffee table in the living room and seeing them together in a way is how I see us together. We belong together, we’re in love, what’s more to say?

When was the first time you really felt like a grown up (if ever)?

For me there is a split in the definition of what it is to be a “grown up”. There are actually two tracks. The first one, where you do “grown up things” happened for me when I learned to drive a car. That was the first time.

What’s more interesting to me is the other definition of being a “grown up” which is to say, acting like what I thought was a “grown up” when I was a kid. Getting older I have revised this viewpoint quite a number of times. Working with people who pose as “grown ups” has shown me the truth of the matter, that nobody really does grow up. We change attire, yes, but we never really stop living in our past and conducting ourselves in that way. It’s in the examples that people provide that I find the most telling. Shirking responsibilities, being fair-weather friends, lying poorly for stupid reasons and generally just being a dick to other people because why should you change, why should you be better than that? Indeed. So, I posit that there are few “grown ups” in the world and that we’re all very much the same petulant temper-tantrum throwing children we were years and years ago. Getting older doesn’t mean we “grow up”, at least not necessarily.

I suppose after thinking about it, there is a third part to being “grown up” and that is the dying a little bit and slowly turning into an autumn person. Letting banality, habit, and incuriosity drain the bright cleverness out of you. Giving up. Mostly in terms of idealism, hopes, dreams, and wishes – watching them all dry up, curl into a ball and roll away in the hot dry wind of getting older. I hope I never get to this point. I have often times said to the people who care for me that there are conditions in which if I find myself in them, I must be put down. This is really the apex of that conditional command. I can’t imagine living a life where there is nothing new. Nothing to dream about. Nothing to hope for. Letting life just wander away. To me, that’s worse than death. It’s death while you are still alive. It should fill everyone with dread, however I see people who are riddled with this awfulness every day.

So, one of the three definitions of being a ‘grown up’? I suppose I am not one. I do not wish to be one, at least not like that. I will always be curious. I will always be idealistic. I will always embrace foolishness for that is life.