A date recently asked me what my guilty pleasure is. “I’m too old to feel guilty about pleasures,” I replied instinctively, and watched his facial muscles adjudicate between wit and wariness in real time.
The thing is... at a certain vintage of adulthood, one’s capacity for embarrassment lapses, much like an unused gym membership, and with roughly the same ceremony. Or, as my niece likes to say on the (very) rare occasions she is impressed by me, “It’s giving… zero effort from you, Maasi.” The importance of this inflection point in life cannot be overstated. It is a watershed moment, the precipice beyond which life as we know it is over, and the person one has been must finally reckon with the person one is about to become.
