Thursday, September 27, 2001
This hasn’t been finished yet and needs to be tidied up, as well. It’s just a loose draft; read at your own risk.
My friend told me this evening that she’d given up pot. Argh. I cringed a bit when I heard it, like a friend had told em that she’d given up listening to music she loved. As I get older and my friends get older, we become more caught up in the world of jobs and tasks and goals that must be met. This leaves little room for time-consuming behaviors such as drug use that don’t offer any tangible benefit except a few hours of pleasure. That our society can slap you around pretty solidly if it catches you toking up only strengthens this process.
I don’t like it. Granted, her grades will probably improve this semester. She told me that she’d already received an “A” on a test in an important class. And that’s excellent. But I st
First, saying “I’ve given up smoking pot” connotes, to me, that a person plans to shift gears out of the chilled, mellow lifestyle where they’re willing to hang out for long periods of time talking or watching movies or watching people and into a more focussed, get-the-job-done lifestyle where the job takes priority over the feeling. This might be a complicated point to explain.
In my experience, experimentation with drugs come along with other forms of experimentation: with the bounds of authority and with one’s sexuality, for example. The stereotypical time for this sort of behavior would be maybe a person’s freshman or sophomore year of college, when they get hat first taste of independence from the immediate watchful eye of their parents but still live a fairly pampered lifestyle (if their first few years were anything like mine, at least — tucked away in a cozy dormitory with a ton of bright kids, college bills taken care of by someone else).
