From Love & Obstacles by Aleksandar Hemon

"This happened in 1981, when I was long and skinny; my legs hurt and I could not stretch them in the cramped bus. Pus accumulated in my budding pimples; there was an arbitrary erection in progress. This was youth: a perpetual sense of unease that made me long for a place where my discomfort would seem natural, where I could wallow in my own wounds. My parents, however, believed that it was their duty to guide me to a good, pleasant place, where I could be normal. They arranged spontaneous conversations about my future, during which they insisted that I declare what it was that I wanted from life. I responded with derivations of Rimbaud’s rants about the unknown quantity awakening in our era’s universal soul, about “scents, sounds, colors, and thought mounting thought,” etc. Needless to say, they were terrified by the fact that they had no idea what I was talking about."