"I am interested. I am interested in everything, except the things that aren't interesting, which is too much lately. When I meet someone new, I don't ask about his job, and I try to avoid finding out for as long as is possible, because what you do for a living is not who you are: I have dated enough bartenders and, worse, lawyers to know that. I wear sunscreen during the day and Retin-A at night. I do what I want. I don't do what other people want me to do. Sometimes I don't do things I want to do because someone else wants me to do them too badly. I am just that way: I cannot be bossed around. I listen carefully when someone is talking to me. I ask for help. I offer to help."The comments underneath are overwhelmingly negative, largely from people who presume that Elizabeth is attempting in some way to tell them how to live their lives. She's not. She's talking about her own and once again about those of us who've looked at what society expects of us and decided it isn't for them (however inadvertently).
She's also, I think, riffing on Mary Schmich's famous Chicago Tribune column, Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young, or as most us know it, The Sunscreen Song, hence the reference to sunscreen above, and especially this paragraph:
"Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't."Word.
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