Choose Life, but our Great Depression is our lives.

The problem with settling down is that the word “settle” is in it. Some of us were taught to “reach for the stars” when we were young and some of us forgot to hear the rest of the sentence, “within reason”. Of course we’re adverse to the idea of “settling down”. It means we’ve settled, have given up whatever dream we might have had to lead mundane ordinary lives reminiscent of what Brad Pitt was preaching about in Fight Club and you older ones might remember from Trainspotting.

I was at my friend’s baby shower this weekend. She’s on baby number three. My mom was there with me and we had a semi-deep conversation that was really not appropriate for a table full of semi-strangers. My mom wishes I was married, had a family. She wants me to “settle down”.

One particular moment in conversation was pretty contradictory:

Mom: Didn’t I tell you when you started dating [that guy who knocked me up] not to have kids. Men take off and leave the women to raise them.

Me: Yes, mom, but you’ve been saying that all my life.

Mom: But wasn’t I right?

Me: Yes, so why do you want me to get married just so the guy can leave me in 10 years for some buxom blonde half my age?

Mom: Why do you think that will happen in 10 years?

Me: All right, five years.

I know what she wants. She wants me to find a nice job here (she’s already started offering to watch My kid nights and weekends), she wants me to find a nice guy, settle down. And all I can hear is Tyler Durden’s voice saying “Fuck off with your sofa units and strine green stripe patterns, I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let… lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may.”

I don’t even worship that movie like some people do, but Tyler makes sense there. If anything then there’s Mark Renton telling me “Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves.”

I just don’t want to settle into being “an average suburbanite slob.” Anyone remember that song?