I turned 20 on Saturday. It’s a bit frightening. Twenty years seems like a long time to me. I’m older than the leftovers in my grandmother’s refrigerator. That may not seem like much of an accomplishment to you, but you don’t know my grandmother. Unless you’re that guy who calls her at 3 a.m. and talks dirty to her, and if you are that guy, please stop. Seriously.
And so much changes in 20 years, too. Think about it, in 1983 an evil Republican shadow government was using an inept, yet strangely popular, American President for their devious capitalistic ends while the economy slowly went down the toilet. Popular music was publicly acknowledged as shallow and rather mediocre by those with any semblance of taste, yet everyone secretly indulged in this music in the privacy of their own homes. And in the Middle East, there was violence despite an absurd number of peace talks. Look at us now, everything is different. After all, now we have the Internet, George Foreman Grills and the task of rebuilding a foreign nation after trashing it. Truly, this is the dawning of a new age.
But I do realize that my newfound maturity does come with certain responsibilities. I find many of my hall-mates look up to me as a sage-like figure. Just yesterday I was teaching a naïve frosh about queer theory and my RA about the location of the clitoris. (In both their defenses, neither had any experience in the area I was tutoring them in.) This normally isn’t a problem until someone comes up to me expecting me to help them with their chemistry homework. It’s times like this that I pretend to be deaf and dumb and then throw myself down a flight of stairs. Works every time.
And if being the wise man of Butterfield B wasn’t bad enough, being 20 also means I have to grow up. Or at least this is what I understood following a conversation with my seven year old cousin over fall break. There’s nothing cuter than having a four-foot tall child say to you, “Jesus Christ! You’re old!” Except for later that night when he says that he doesn’t want “any fucking peas.” Charming kid, my cousin. But later, conducting a poll of seven year olds I coerced into my car with a promise of candy, I found that many agreed and that I was old. And we know what being old means means: a mortgage, a wife, a suit, and a boring office job. It also means I can’t watch Fraggle Rock in my underwear anymore…I think.
Unfortunately, being a grown up is harder than you would think. Tom Hanks made it look so easy in Big. But after hours of hanging around in a toy store playing on one of those giant pianos I didn’t get any job offers, though I did get a frisky man-handling by a security guard as I was escorted out of the building. Unfortunately, I did not get his number. My later attempt to get a mortgage proved equally fruitless, though I blame this failure on the fact that I was not wearing any pants. And this whole marriage is fairly troublesome as well. It’s a lot harder to get a wife now that you can’t hit them on the head with your club and drag them back to your cave. Why did people stop doing that? It was so convenient. On the plus side, I did manage to get a suit. It’s amazing the things you find during a little late-night grave-robbing.
Somewhere in this odyssey of mine I had a quarter-life crisis. My heart started pounding, my head starting spinning, and my pants suddenly got very tight. I began to worry about my future, about the path I was taking in life. I had so many questions. What do I want to do with my life? Can I do what I want? Will I have enough money? Will I have enough talent? Why did that kid wear tissue boxes on his feet as a Halloween costume? I had no answers to these questions; except for the last one because I asked the kid and he said he was Howard Hughes. I became confused, lost, whiney, and full of angst.
And then it hit me. Confused? Lost? Whiney? Full of angst? I sound just like your typical teenager. In fact I’m just one retainer short of being in high school again. Perhaps being 20 is just like being 14. Perhaps angst isn’t strictly limited to adolescence. Maybe I can be a frightened, confused fifty-year-old man who writes bad poetry in his secret poetry journal he keeps hidden behind the toilet.
With this thought in mind, I broke out the flannel shirts I had kept hidden for years and broke into a sad crying fit because I had no friends. It was the good old days all over again. Maybe the good old days aren’t behind me, maybe I can be just as miserable and alone at 26 as I was at 16. Hell, it beats growing up.
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