So many shades of grey (gray?)

Firstly, I'm a self-professed grammar nazi with, I'm just going to go ahead and say, a pretty impressive vocabulary. But um. I still don't know which of those spellings of... that word that starts with g... is the one that actually means the color/is a noun. I think it's grey? (Yesssss I just looked it up and I was right.) Thaaaaat's embarrassing.

Secondly, I just got really bored and re-read most of this blog and found two interesting things: 1) Happy 9 months, apartment. I really do have the oddest memory for esoteric and oddly specific things. 2) I pointed out in the post where I interviewed with Bronx House that it'd take me about 6 months, minimum, to find an acting job that I liked better and jump ship. Well, it wasn't for an acting job - yet - but I did, in fact, put in notice at Bronx House this week. By the time I leave in August, it will have been, you guessed it, almost precisely six months.

But thirdly, what I've really been thinking about of course refers to my oh-so-original and creative title. As children, we all learn certain fundamentals of right and wrong - it's how we construct a society. It's how we, presumably, grow up not to be criminals, reprobates, and ne'er-do-wells. Or at the very least, how we learn enough to be nice to other people for our own gain if nothing else. We are taught that it is not okay to hit your classmate in the face with a shovel or bite him when he makes fun of you, to throw rocks at the street to try and scare drivers, or to lie to your teachers about whether or not you did your homework. Not, of course, that I, perfect angel that I was growing up, would have done any of these things.

As we get older we learn that these absolutes hold, but there are instances in which, for example, one lies to spare someone else's feelings. That good people do bad things, and bad people do good things, and good and bad things happen to all different kinds of people. We introduce, out of necessity, a certain degree of moral relativism to our lives. And you start to realize there are concepts that once seemed either inextricably linked or mutually exclusive that in truth are neither of those things. Dignity and pride, for example. Not, as one might suspect, mutually inclusive. Not, in fact, terribly related at all.

See also, "the things I'll never say" and "thing things I never got to say." Everything I always should've said, it turns out, is that way because it's precisely everything I never wanted to say. Or knew how to say.

It's very frustrating, I guess, to continually come face to face with the realization that growing older doesn't always imply growing wiser.