Falling in Love is Hard on Your Knees
Or Proof #652 that law school degrades your ability to function in the real world.
Being an adult is scary, you have all these unfounded and irrational reactions to things you would have brushed off as a kid. For instance, skinning your knees: as an adult, when you fall and skin your knees, you immediately look around to see who saw you, then you very loudly point out the existence of a hole or uneven ground. Next you try to blame someone else and threaten to sue the city. You then take yourself home, groan when you walk up the stairs, complain about how you’re going to have a scar, properly apply antibacterial everything and numerous BandAids, take some aspirin and use your wounds as an excuse to get out of all physical activities for the next week.
Subtract 15-20 years from your age. Remember when you were young and you would skin your knees, get up and keep playing until you were called home? At that point you only sniffled slightly when your mother used brute force to sanitize your bleeding knees, lamenting the fact that you won’t be able to wear a skirt to the family function this weekend. You were much happier when she made up for it with ice cream and BandAids with cartoon characters. You proudly pointed out your battle wounds to aunts & uncles with more ice cream at the family function where you wore a skirt anyways. Where have those days gone?
Not only has getting old taken a toll on my resiliency to skinned knees, but law school has addled my mind so that I am no longer capable of walking, talking and carrying things at the same time. The only good thing that resulted from throwing myself onto the street was that I now own a very trendy pair of ripped jeans. Thank goodness I gave up rollerblading years ago. There is no way I could venture something that dangerous these days. My head is now at least 6 feet away from the pavement in rollerblades. When you’re little the ground is much closer, and a lot less daunting.
As adults we should be able to pick ourselves up and keep on playing, but that’s not going to happen is it? We’re too concerned about what other people think, not about what is going to make us happy. Where have our inner children gone? Can we entice them back with ice cream?
Being an adult is scary, you have all these unfounded and irrational reactions to things you would have brushed off as a kid. For instance, skinning your knees: as an adult, when you fall and skin your knees, you immediately look around to see who saw you, then you very loudly point out the existence of a hole or uneven ground. Next you try to blame someone else and threaten to sue the city. You then take yourself home, groan when you walk up the stairs, complain about how you’re going to have a scar, properly apply antibacterial everything and numerous BandAids, take some aspirin and use your wounds as an excuse to get out of all physical activities for the next week.
Subtract 15-20 years from your age. Remember when you were young and you would skin your knees, get up and keep playing until you were called home? At that point you only sniffled slightly when your mother used brute force to sanitize your bleeding knees, lamenting the fact that you won’t be able to wear a skirt to the family function this weekend. You were much happier when she made up for it with ice cream and BandAids with cartoon characters. You proudly pointed out your battle wounds to aunts & uncles with more ice cream at the family function where you wore a skirt anyways. Where have those days gone?
Not only has getting old taken a toll on my resiliency to skinned knees, but law school has addled my mind so that I am no longer capable of walking, talking and carrying things at the same time. The only good thing that resulted from throwing myself onto the street was that I now own a very trendy pair of ripped jeans. Thank goodness I gave up rollerblading years ago. There is no way I could venture something that dangerous these days. My head is now at least 6 feet away from the pavement in rollerblades. When you’re little the ground is much closer, and a lot less daunting.
As adults we should be able to pick ourselves up and keep on playing, but that’s not going to happen is it? We’re too concerned about what other people think, not about what is going to make us happy. Where have our inner children gone? Can we entice them back with ice cream?
posted by Daughter of Shylock at 11:34 AM
2 Comments:
Good points here. Childhood worries at their worst included getting picked last in basketball and keeping up with the latest action figures. Now, it's about getting picked for admission to a certain school and keeping a nice and fit figure. Times change, and our perspectives are just as dynamic.
That's the problem with growing up--as you get bigger, so does your world, and you see more complexities than you did when you were a child. When you scraped your knee at five years old, all you saw was the Snoopy bandage. Twenty years later, you have to worry about more than the color of your Band-Aid--Who saw me? What if this gets infected? What if this makes me late to school? Why can't anything ever go right?
I suppose it wouldn't be a crime if we indulged our inner children with ice cream every once in a while. But if you can figure out a way to gratify the children without freaking out about how you're going to burn off all those extra calories, you truly have found the secret of life.
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