The Ideal Grown-Up
Juan Ruíz As I venture into the waters of adulthood, I find that I am encountering many questions about who I want to be, and why. I have to decide not only my career path and coursework, but the kind of human being I aspire to be. I must assess not only where I am at, but where I am going. We as humans have the ability of chameleons, in the sense that we are constantly capable of changing ourselves, often to fit into our environments. Because of that ability to form and reform ourselves, we are never tied down to a specific identity. You and I can be someone one day, and be a completely different someone the next. We can change our appearance, clothing, dialect, online presence, character, and friendships at the drop of a hat. Thus, we have a responsibility, or at least a need, to choose what kind of person we aspire to be. (I say "aspire" only because I doubt we will ever fully accomplish our idealized versions of ourselves.) For a long time, I aspired to be a "cool ...
