Journal: News & Comment

Maybe I should print it out

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I hope this link to the Teenager's Guide to the Real World is still available in five years, when I gain my first teenage daughter. I sure could have used knowing some of this stuff in 1982.

The first chapter puts it this way:

• If you don't pay the rent, you are homeless
• You must have a job to pay the rent
• Working 60 hours a week in a dead-end, minimum wage job to live in a crappy apartment with no a/c really stinks
• Even if you don't care one bit about adults and jobs and school right now, you will once you have to pay the rent

Incidentally, this bit (and the whole love, sex, and marriage section) is rather too moralizing and also, on occasion, untrue by my moral compass. It also, as far as I can tell, completely ignores anyone who's gay. But the introductory portions of the book are extremely good, and even the love, sex, and marriage part has some good points, so on balance it's still worth reading.

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