The Vine: July 16, 2003
After reading a letter from High School Heartache, I felt compelled to write and share with all those prematurely grown-up high schoolers some advice from the heart. I’ve been there. I’m smart, fairly good-looking, very social, very mature for my age, and have always hung out comfortably with people two to twenty years my senior. High school was no different, as most of my closer friends were 20-25. That’s just where I fit in best.
When I was 16, my mother explained her restrictions on letting me hang out too much with older guys by saying that “any 25-year-old who wants to spend most of his time around a 16-year-old girl is not for you” (or something like that). I stomped and complained and resented her for the perceived insult, but as the years went by, I realized she not only had a possibly good point, she was dead-on, no arguments, nail-on-the-head exactly right.
In high school, my maturity level was about the level of the twenty-somethings that I hung out with. That’s why we got along so well. But people with that much intelligence and sense in high school generally go to college. And people change in college. A LOT. They grow, they evolve, they learn (not just book smarts), they meet people, they learn independence and they mature. In five years, you’ll look back at that teen you once were and be amazed at far you’ve come. Those 25-year-olds that you got along with so well back then? They won’t have changed. They’ve had their chance to evolve and grow and blossom, and you’ll leave them in the dust. You’ll want your own kind.
So my advice in high school is to just take it easy. Don’t give your heart away because he’s the most awesome person you’ve ever met; you’re going to meet thousands more in the next few years. Don’t let your crushes overcome your sensibilities; focus on getting into a good school, having fun, and living life. Enjoy the friendships, have fun hanging out and chilling, but don’t expect to make it a long term, serious commitment.
This isn’t a lecture about the problems with age differences. My theory is that once both people pass 21, go for it. But the 18-21 gap is about two decades long, and under the majority of circumstances, should be played with very, very carefully. As much as you hate to hear it, you’ve still got a lot of growing up to do.
Been There, Done That
Dear Been,
You know, I considered saying something along those lines — the under eighteen/over twenty-one split is a lot bigger than three years, it’s true. I’ve heard that, at 16, I seemed quite mature and self-possessed. I’d also never spent more than a week away from my family, or kissed a boy. I’d gone to one school my whole life. I hadn’t lived yet, really, and if a 25-year-old had found that interesting…let’s say that, these days, I would find that 25-year-old somewhat suspect.
My situation isn’t analogous to HSH’s, of course, and I don’t mean that teenagers are all boring and/or naive, of course; some are, some aren’t. But at 16, you do still have a lot ahead of you, especially if you plan to go to college, and once you get to college, you’ll want to spend time with that peer group to get the most out of the experience, I think.
As Been said, it’s not about the age difference. It’s about the ages 18-22. Stay flexible.
Hey Sars,
I have an issue I haven’t seen in The Vine before, so I was wondering if you or your readers have any ideas for me.
In short — I can’t sit still. Ever. If I’m watching a movie, sitting in class, hanging out with friends, at work, at the computer, trying to fall asleep — I’m always fidgeting and I just can’t seem to quit it.
I cross and uncross my legs endlessly, my skin would probably be better if I wasn’t touching my face all the time, I reposition myself every few seconds, I flip my hair, I bite my nails or fingers. It’s embarrassing, and I’ll bet anything it’s annoying to people I’m sitting or sleeping next to. I see everyone else just calmly sitting in one place and focusing and wonder why I can’t do that. I only noticed this a year or so ago, but I’m pretty sure I’ve always done it and it drives me insane. Once a semester, at the crisis center I work at, we do a skit where we parody each other. It’s always really funny, but the person who is pretending to be me is always restless and primping.
I want to stop it, but I have no idea what causes it. Smoking worked for David Sedaris (although I don’t have ticks or anything) but it doesn’t do anything for me. Telling myself to just sit still lasts about three seconds. I’m not hyperactive in a disordered kind of way as far as I can tell, and I don’t have a need to call attention to myself all the time; in fact, I’m a very self-conscious person, so I’d rather not call negative attention to myself this way.
Is this excess energy? Like a lot of college students, I’m pretty lazy, I don’t get much sleep, I don’t eat very well, I go to the bars on weekends and have been known to smoke a lot of pot — can this be a product of unhealthy living habits? Do I just need more exercise? What is this about and how can I fix it?
Thanks,
Shifty at SUNY
Dear Shifty,
It sounds to me like you’ve got either a low-level anxiety going or an ADD-like disorder.
My advice is to knock off the booze and pot first — go straight-edge for a week and track the fidgeting in a little diary. Controlled substances mask things like this, so cut them out and write down all of your twitches and tics.
Next, go to the campus health center or your doctor at home and get a complete physical to rule out any neurological or other problems. Tell them exactly what you’ve told me; hand over your fidgeting journal, because that will help them make either a diagnosis or a referral.
From what I can tell, you probably do have a hyperactivity problem of some sort, but you don’t want one. I don’t blame you, but it’s interfering with your quality of life. Go get it taken care of.
I was wondering if you might be able to help shed some light on our problem. We recently moved into a great fixer-upper house that needs work in many rooms. When I was younger, I had a babysitter who came from a great family who shared our moral beliefs and lived two minutes away. Now the four children are all grown up, one in college and the other three with budding careers. We remain very close to them and consider them our extended family. The son, M, works in construction, catering, and an assortment of other odd jobs. We hired M and some people he knows and is friends with to do the painting and sanding of the rooms. However, he is really stressing my mother.
Although the work quality is fine, he never sticks to a schedule. M will tell my mother he will be here at 7 AM, then will call at 2:30 in the afternoon saying he can’t make it. My mother and I will be out, and he’ll just drive over to our house expecting us to be there and making my mother feel guilty because he has to wait. My mother and I are sometimes at home, relaxing, and he’ll spontaneously show up, with neither of us in presentable condition. He never calls us to say that he is coming over. He starts rooms and leaves them for weeks, making them uninhabitable. We never know what room he will work on or when he will come over.
My mother has tried gently reminding him to call us, but he doesn’t take the hint and never does. We can’t be too hard on him, because we are very close to the family and don’t want to offend them. However, we feel that M needs to shape up, because his carelessness is driving us crazy! How should we approach this?
Made Mad by M
Dear Mad,
M is getting paid to do a job. You have the right to decide when and in what timeframe that work will take place, and to find another contractor if M doesn’t follow your guidelines.
Tell him so. If his family wants to get all up in arms because you called him on his flakiness, let them — again, he’s getting paid, not doing you a favor out of the goodness of his heart. If anything, you did him the favor by throwing him the gig.
So, lay down the law. “M, we need to sit down and agree on the hours at which you will show up, and then you need to show up at those times. We need to come to an understanding on when you will and will not come to the house, and that you will call before coming over if we don’t expect you. We need to go through the list of jobs and come up with deadlines for when you will finish each one. If you don’t agree to do these things, or if you continue to show up late or unannounced and leave jobs half-done for weeks on end, we will have no choice but to find someone else to do the work.”
Mixing business with friendship is often a bad idea for exactly this reason, but the fact is that you wouldn’t tolerate M’s behavior from a stranger working on your house, and you shouldn’t tolerate it from M either.
The letter from “In a haze” reminded me of something I’ve often wondered about.
Now, I’m all for free will, and I figure it’s every human being’s right to do things I personally would not, so long as it’s not hurting anyone unwilling. So as far as I’m concerned, smoking is fair enough, so long as it’s not being forced on other people, either. And definitely not being forced on me — I don’t mind the smell so much as the fact that I’m both asthmatic and specifically allergic, so inhaling more than a couple of breaths of passive smoke triggers a potentially severe asthma attack.
My question is — what’s the polite way to ask someone I don’t know/don’t know very well to please stand downwind and not blow smoke in my face? Some smokers seem to take my stepping around them to get upwind or “Would you mind standing back, I’m allergic to smoke” as an insult to them or their lifestyle choices.
It’s not a problem with friends — I have friends who smoke, but they’re aware of my issue with it and take care not to inflict it on me, a courtesy I sincerely appreciate. So what’s the best approach with strangers?
Socially Tolerant, Physically Intolerant
Dear STPI,
“Excuse me — so sorry to trouble you, but would you mind terribly just moving downwind a bit? I wouldn’t ask, but I’m very allergic to smoke. Thanks so much.”
Anyone who acts put out by that needs to get a life.
Dear Sars,
I’ve been reading your column for a little while, and I have a bit of a situation with one of my friends that I could use some advice on. I have been friends with “Sally” for almost ten years now. We went to high school and university together. In the last year and a half, my group of friends and I have noticed that she has been pulling away from us. We all graduated from university a year ago, except for Sally, who failed some papers and had to go back and repeat them.
Three of us from our group (“Mary,” “Jo,” and myself) decided to move in together, and have been living across the city from Sally. Unfortunately, Sally doesn’t have any transport, so we haven’t been able to see her as much as we used to. But every so often we would make the effort to see her and even offer to pick her up and take her out. However, every time we ask her out, she turns us down for one reason or another. It has gotten to the stage where we don’t bother asking her out anymore, because we know she’ll say no straight away. Now, if she had another social life or group of friends, I would understand, but all she seems to do is sit at home and watch TV (not that there’s anything wrong with that, but everyone needs to get out and do things once in a while, don’t they?).
Things seem to have gotten worse now that Sally has finally graduated. She finished university in November (I’m from New Zealand and our semesters are structured very differently), and we all assumed she, like the rest of us, would get a job reasonably quickly. Eight months have passed and she still hasn’t found a job, and I can’t quite figure out why. She has the same degree as Jo and I, similar work experience, and she’s extremely smart, probably smarter than the rest of us. The job market here isn’t too bad. It seems to me like she’s not even applying for jobs, and it is kind of worrying. She’s also extremely touchy about the subject. When I do see her and try to ask how the job hunt is going, she is very cagey and lately even refuses to talk about it. I want to help her out, as I know a bit about the job-hunting process, but she is so unwilling to discuss it, I don’t want to bring it up and risk offending her.
I know a lot of it probably relates to her problems at university, and I’m guessing she may also be resentful that the rest of us are rooming together, but I really want to try and help her out. She’s just so difficult to talk to about serious things like this and I don’t know how to approach her about it.
What do you think I should do about it? Should I try and say something to her? Or just let us drift further apart until we eventually lose touch? Is this just another part of growing up and growing apart?
Thanks for your help,
Worried in New Zealand
Dear Worried,
Well, sometimes you grow up and away from your uni friends, but I think the issue here isn’t that you don’t want to stay in touch with Sally; it’s that you suspect Sally is depressed, and you don’t know how to broach the subject.
Just…broach it. It might not go over well, but you should give your concerns a name sooner rather than later. Tell her that you don’t judge her, but you’ve noticed that she doesn’t want to go out much and she doesn’t seem to have committed to finding a job, and it’s got you worried about her — does she feel down? Does she want to talk about anything? Because you want to help her, and if that means leaving her alone, well, okay, but if it doesn’t, you want to make sure.
Stress that it’s her happiness you have in mind. She might get mad, but you’ll feel better for having brought it up, and at least she’ll know you care, however she chooses to interpret it.
Dear Sars,
I’ve been working my way through the Vine archives for about a week now, and I’ve been surprised a few times at how good your advice has been. [“Gee, ‘thanks.’ Heh.” — Sars] Right now it’s after two in the morning, and I’m studying for my upcoming finals. The reason I’m taking a break to write you is because while I’m studying, I can’t help but wonder why the hell I’m doing this.
I don’t hate school; it’s a pain in the ass, but it’s not hell or anything. My problem is this — my passion and area of excellence in school has been, since I was little, English. Anything, I guess, that has to do with writing and language has always come naturally to me. My writing is the only thing in my life about which I’ve ever been a perfectionist. I think that (the perfectionism) goes far to explain why I chose to major in microbiology. (Not as much self-imposed pressure to be great. I can live, I guess, with being a mediocre scientist, more easily than I could live with being anal and supremely driven.) I have always been interested in science, good at it but not great. Teachers in school would always let me do my own thing when it came to my English and Literature classes, even in college. They claimed that there was nothing, really, that they could teach me. So I was left to my independent reading and writing assignments, a fact which always made me a bit angry. Why else was I there if not to improve? I think that this is another reason for my choosing to major in a science — there would always be a lot of people smarter than I, whom I could really respect and learn from. As conceited as that sounds. I’d always hoped that each English professor that claimed to have nothing to teach me was a fluke, but it’s happened quite a bit.
So I’m majoring in biology, and it’s okay. There are a lot of jobs that I could take with my degree once I get it next year. There weren’t ever really very many jobs available to an English major that I found appealing. Nothing really realistic, anyway. And I know it makes me sound like a sellout, but money is a bit important to me, and I know of no interesting English-major-related jobs that pay much.
So I should be certain, I think, that what I’m doing is the right thing. But a lot of the time I’m miserable in my classes. God, a lot of the time I’m daydreaming about being in an English class. The future jobs in science sound appealing, but the learning process isn’t nearly as fun as I expect the career to be. So here’s my question: Should a person just learn what they love, and to hell with it? Should I just trust that if I’m enjoying learning it, I’ll enjoy the career it will bring, even if I haven’t heard of any (realistically attainable) careers in that field? I do like science; I just feel sometimes like I’m turning my back on a huge part of me. Do you think it’s possible to have lukewarm feelings about your classes, and still find a life of enjoyment from the career they will bring? Sometimes my science classes can sweep me off my feet, but it’s never the same rush I can get from composing even one perfect sentence. Science is pretty damn hard for me, and sometimes I think I just enjoy conquering it.
I don’t know, sign me…
Maybe She’s A Sellout, Maybe She’s Just Retarded
Dear Maybe,
It’s my feeling that you should study exactly what you want to in college, regardless of its relative use later on. You’ll spend much of the rest of your life obligated to do the practical thing; college is the time to focus on the things you love to do.
Not just for selfish reasons — you do it so you can rule things out. In my case, I did focus on English and creative writing, and I could still rule things out as a result; I wrote reasonably good poetry, but not great, and I didn’t think I should do it for a living. I wrote passable news stories, but I didn’t want to string for a newspaper.
It’s possible to do both, to carry a double major, to major in microbio and write for campus publications in your off time. But if you want to take English classes and work on your writing, you should do it. You can always go back and take practical classes in biology later if you need them for a specific job posting…and I hate to tell you, but there’s always more to learn when it comes to writing, and your teachers thus far have done you a disservice by suggesting otherwise.
I can’t tell you which road you should follow; I can tell you that you can always double back and go the other way if the first one you try doesn’t work out. And I can also tell you that if you take the writing road, you had better love writing. When you do it for a living — and that’s if you can make a living from it, which is not a sure bet, certainly, at least when you start out — it’s still work. It’s not enough to think that you do it well, or that you have a natural talent that doesn’t bear teaching, because not everyone is going to think that, or want to pay you for it. If you think that that perfect-sentence “rush” is enough for you, you should pursue it; it’s a rare thing to find something that you both love to do and do well. But if you think switching to the English department guarantees you a thirties-New Yorker muses-and-martinis existence…it doesn’t, and if making a comfortable and reliable living is your priority, a career in the practical sciences might make more sense.
But the point is that it’s still college. You can still try these things out and see how they work for you. I’d do that now before money necessarily becomes part of the equation.
[7/16/03]
Tags: friendships health and beauty the fam workplace
