I'll be embarrassingly honest with you: I am 28 years old and I still daydream about having super powers.

My super power would be the ability to manipulate space and time. Who needs to be able to fly when you can just think yourself to Madrid for lunch? Superhuman strength would be swell, but you're still going to break a sweat from time to time.

That's not the only thing I daydream about. Just off the top of my head, I also fantasize about living on a train; being a pro rugby player; being a rock star; being president of the United States or prime minister of Britain; being immensely good at sword play; and being a rogue space fighter pilot with a sardonic computer program/hologram side-kick.

Occasionally I'll have grown-up daydreams. I daydream about being a successful author or having enough money to buy my wife everything she wants. Sometimes I daydream about what it would be like to not spend so many hours of my day locked up in daydreams.

It's all just one of the signs that I am a crap grownup. I don't think about my retirement. I'm still not ready for kids. I still do my laundry at my parents' house.

I have friends who are homeowners, doctors, teachers and business leaders. My wife is going to save the world. I, on the other hand, am presently eating Fritos and drinking beer -- and there is really nothing I would prefer to do.

LIFE FILES What Are Your Daydreams About? E-mail our advice columnists Life Files Archive

I suppose there are a few grownup things that I am good at. I pay my bills on time. I drive the speed limit. I have a successful marriage -- but even there I wonder whether I'm being very grownup.

On those relationship-based reality television programs people always use strange grownup-type words to describe the relationship. They'll say things like: "I feel that I am invested in you and I would like to take things to the next phase."

Invested? Is having an affair referred to as diversifying one's love portfolio?

I married my wife for basically the same reason I chased Erin Cooney around the playground of Bunker Hill Elementary School in fifth grade: She's pretty and I like the way I feel inside when she laughs at my jokes.

Rachel is hot. That's hardly a grownup reason for marriage, is it? I should have been thinking about the accumulation of love capital. I should have been drawing up fancy graphs to track our relationship progress. What woman doesn't swoon at the sight of a pie chart?

I can't really say what motivated my wife to marry me, but I would suggest that her investment didn't really pan out.

My wife is pretty good at being a grownup. While earning her master's degree, she also works in the community and is an active part of her church. Add this to the duties of keeping her husband from setting himself on fire. Her ability to do grownup things mystifies me.

Lately, I have found myself juggling a whopping two separate projects outside of work. I am finding this sort of multitasking to be impossible (perhaps because so much of my time is spent daydreaming about what it will be like when the projects are completed). So I look at my wife's competency with envy.

"Tell me how to do it," I will occasionally cry out to her.
"Do what?"
"Everything. All the stuff you do. I am trying to do less than you and I can't do it. Tell me how."

I feel almost as if grownup proficiency is some sort of video game cheater code -- up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start -- and my wife and the rest of the world are simply refusing to reveal it to me.

Normally, at this point in an article, a columnist would begin steering toward a happy ending. You can probably guess that the easiest route to that ending in this case would be to sing the praises of people who are free spirits. But free-spirited people -- at least those who describe themselves as such -- are annoying.

Free spirits make dinner dates and then fail to show up. Free spirits leave you stuck covering their half of the rent. Free spirits neglect to change the oil in their cars then call you on your lunch break to come pick them up and take them to yoga class when their cars break down on the freeway.

I don't really want that. I want to be a grownup; I just don't know how to do that. Perhaps the rest of the grownup world feels this way, too. It would certainly explain all those commercials for pills designed to cure various disorders that come with aging.

When I ask my wife how to be a grownup, she just shrugs her shoulders and says: "I don't know, you just do it."

I guess the key to being a grownup is realizing that there are things you may not want to do, but doing them anyway. I'm working toward that -- and daydreaming about what it will be like.

Chris Cope is married, with no children. His column appears every other Tuesday.