on becoming but not becoming better?

Yesterday, while at the end-of-school assembly, the seventh grade performed an Oasis song. I looked around at the room full of earnest parents dressed for the warm spring weather, showing up, and choked back some kind of laugh and something else.

They sang "Don't Look Back in Anger." This song played persistently through my middle school years, and I remember listening and singing along with the same earnestness reflected in the seventh graders up there. I felt something about being old, about it all being so funny, about how the becoming just keeps becoming—now an