24

I've had the misfortune recently of being trapped in cars with twenty-four year olds - can you believe there were twenty of them?! Jkjk. Anyway, here's how these conversations went. The first person was intelligent and clearly a caring person, and in three or four years she might make a perfectly companionable road tripper. But in her 24 year-old incarnation, she was insufferable. She received many more questions than she asked, and even without prompt made declarations about herself, e.g., that she had "like ten years of cross-country running experience" but now preferred to "go on really superlong hikes, like fifteen miles or more." She had lots of ideas about how things should be done, but hadn't yet learned to discern when it is worthwhile to fight to get one's way and when it doesn't matter, and so she steamrolled everyone in the car with bossiness. An interesting thing I learned being around her is that one really easy way to goad recent graduates from U. Penn is to refer to their school as "Penn State."

The second person was friendly and eager to engage in conversation, so much so that even though I was sitting in the backseat on a nauseating grind up from sea level in Fremont to 5000' feet in Yosemite, using 99% of my concentration to keep the In-n-Out double-double animal-style with extra pickles plus cherry milkshake I'd just eaten from spraying forth in a meaty froth all over the red leather interior of her much older boyfriend's little red BMW, she twisted her body around to face me and JY so that we could hear about her experiences spelunking in Yuba County and the various two-wheeled motor vehicles she had owned. Mind you, she was not boastful like the first 24 year-old, but merely excruciatingly boring. "First I had a 150 cc bike. Which is like a scooter. Then I had to get a license. I think anything over 150 cc and you need a license. Then I got a motorcycle. But I had to sell it," so on. I cannot describe to you precisely what made her nattering boring, because in another circumstance, I might be very interested in learning about other people's passions, but just something about the way she delivered those words . . . supernatural forces, zoochosis, or maybe just excessive politeness, compelled questions from my mouth along the lines of, "Oh, how much do motorcycles cost?" and "How come you decided to sell it?" JY looked at me in wide-eyed disbelief at one point, and later, at the campsite, berated me, saying, "Why did you encourage it?!" But boringness knows no bounds of age, and what made her seem 24 to me was not that my contacts spontaneously dried out when I listened to her, but that she was telling us also that she wanted to change her name from Susie Penny (an approximation of her birth name) to Gondolia Pupusa (an approximation of the name she wants for herself) so that when her Edwardian dress designs start to attract notice, her business name and personal name are aligned. This seemed like a very 24 year-old thing to say.

The third person was 24 years old but looked so much like a twelve year-old boy that she entered the Maker Faire on a child (12 and under) ticket that I bought for her as her supervising adult without arousing any suspicion. She likewise seemed like a lively, intelligent, and completely insufferable person. She had just spent a few years, after graduating from college, in New Zealand, and all wayward points of conversation were drawn as if by invisible woolen filament back to the mother sheep, back to the best country in the world, apparently known to nobody but one curly-haired 24 year-old American (though not by choice!) intercontinental air traveler. I'm giving you a ride from BART? "Cheers." It's too hot in the car? "Let me take off my jumper." We pass an All-Blacks bumper sticker on the San Mateo Bridge? "Whooo! Kiwi pride!" Decorations on the child seats on the pushcarts at K-Mart? "We don't have those in New Zealand!" I could not control myself after the jumper comment and snorted, "You mean your sweatshirt? Welcome back to America, honey!" Also insufferable was talk of rewriting classic works of English literature as a stories about a 2010 Kiwi auto race, and cheery intentions to apply for fellowships in poetry writing. What kind of curmudgeonly old person am I that I never want to spend another second with a 24 year-old?