I am a rebel.  I have always been a rebel.  And so, naturally, I have always scoffed at the ambitions of conservative society.  We are taught as children that our ultimate goal should be to find an appropriate partner, to have children (possibly giving up our career in the process) and to aim for ownership of a home, typically in the suburbs with a little picket fence.  And, of course, if we buy into this dream, then the day our house deal comes through is going to be one of the most exciting days of our lives.  The same sense of self-congratulation that comes with having children of our own, as though it were an amazing feat, as though no-one had ever done it before.  What a ridiculously mundane, mediocre dream it is.  Why, how could one want to be the same as everybody else?

Which is why I was taken by surprise tonight on the sky train, when I found myself looking at an ad with some young nuclear family, woman smilingly clutching baby, yuppie man in polo shirt high-fiving young son, standing in the garden of their brand-new house, proud owners who had realized their ultimate nuclear ambition and were jumping for joy, and, just for a moment, I found myself being dragged into their world, a fleeting moment of envy as I considered my own solitary existence in my one-room apartment, and I found myself wondering if one day I might have my own garden to jump up and down in, my own family member to high five in self-congratulatory fashion.  And then it hit me: I am becoming like everyone else – those conservative ambitions must have been creeping into my subconscious in the night.  How could I let that happen?  When, where and how did I start to change?  Or does it merely come down to a momentary lapse of reason?