Be kind to me or treat me mean. I'll make the most of it, I'm an extraordinary machine

I'm pretty sure it's a natural and practically necessary part of human growth to constantly feel like you are a completely rational, developed being, from when you're 3 to when you're 30. A five-year-old can't conceivably look at himself from an adult-like third party perspective and realize that the seemingly absolute need to go to the legos station before the craft station isn't as vital as it appears. A teenager probably won't realize that waiting another couple weeks for her license isn't the absolute end of the world. None of that matters, though, because since everyone lives moment by moment in their own skin, place, and time, all we can really expect to do is be ourselves, biased and nearsighted as we are, in any given moment.

Ironically, I've always reacted to that Truth of Life in the way teenage smokers react to surgeon generals' warnings. I consistently try to view my life from the big picture, in an effort to figure out if the situation I'm in will seem like a big deal in five years, if the way I'm reacting is appropriate, how the other people involved feel or view the situation, etc. Basically, my life has been a constant attempt to subvert that self-described natural and necessary part of human growth. A benefit of my little guessing game is that for my entire life people have congratulated me on coming across as mature. The cosmic joke of it is that despite my vehement efforts, I still, naturally, look back on time after time where I thought I was operating under perfect objective rationality that would be agreeable to myself of the past, present, and future only to find that I, you know... wasn't.

For example, I clearly, distinctly remember Linda Age 8 Or So walking up to my mom, who was folding laundry in her room, and declaring that I would never, ever want to move out of our house, no matter how old I got, and I would stay and live with her forever. She laughed and told me that my opinion on that would probably change when move-out time finally came around. I got offended by that, so to placate me mom told me that if I still felt that way when I was 20, I would be welcome to stay. I went back to my room and tried to figure out if she was right, that for some mystical reason I would someday want to leave home. I considered the benefits of staying home: always being provided with food and shelter, never having to get a job, never having to be away from my mom. I couldn't think of any benefits of moving out, and, even when trying my hardest to imagine how Linda Age 20 would think, couldn't come up with one reason why I'd want to go. Clearly I would wind up proving my mom wrong.

This is not to say that my way of thinking is totally embarrassing and pointless. I'm pretty sure conditioning myself to be semi-future minded probably does regularly provide me with an extra boost of perspective which might manifest itself in helpful ways. But, obviously, that kind of self-assurance is also bound to manifest itself in a nice bite in the ass every now and then, too.

"When will the unexpected cease to be foreseeable or vice versa? When will a political label spout an opposite catechism or a psychosocioesxogenerational behaviour be unbehaviouristic? Or could the expectation generate the expected, which then and luckily will surprise us all with the pleasure of recognition?"