19 going on 4

I recently had my 19th birthday, and by recently I mean several months ago. (hey thats recent compared to the 80 odd years that I plan to live). There I was, sitting in my room eating bad pizza, watching a crappy action film and an idea walked up and cock-punched me: "I AM AN ADULT". Indeed I was and am now considered to be of "legal" adulthood. The strange thing was i was still wearing the same clothes and eating the same crappy food. No test were administered, no challenges need to be completed.

When I was still old enough to think that life doesn't get better then catapulting my friends from see-saws, I thought that at a certain age people just became cool. As if on the exact anniversary of my birth several years from then, i would be struck by a bolt of lightning and become beset by adoring fans, (but no girls because back then it was a know fact that girls were "icky"). However, years went by, and no lightning bolt came. All the pre-teen fantasy novels and comic books were wrong; I was never bit by a radiated spider, I never got an alien power ring. I did, however, mutate, but i think thats better known as puberty.

An boy, were those the days. pumped full of hormones, I began to grow hair in areas that i didn't want it, and upon failing to will it to stop growing, convinced myself that i was slowly turning into a wolf. For a full week i began to learn how to hunt for food. Every voice crack convinced me that my "howl" was coming along nicely. It was only when my mother discovered my in an attempt to comune with my three year old Golden Retriever, did she explain that my mutation was completely normal. 

Thats when it truly hit me, this must be how people become cool, and the coolest people are singers in bands. It was this reasoning that led me to choir, and it was the voice cracks that lead me out of choir. Obviously my new "coolness" was based on something else, perhaps sports. I signed up for basketball tryouts. Those tryouts taught me two things: after growing six inches in a year, you foot coordination goes out the window, and second, gravity plus gym floor equals broken tooth (it was a baby tooth, so it was ok). with little else to turn to I did what every unskilled teenager with no release for the tidal wave of hormones pulsing through their body does, got angst.

If there was a bigger duche on the playground, i didn't know them. Turning by spoon sharp wit on my fellow sixth graders, I proceded to prove that just because you have no talent, doesn't mean you have to be humble (upon review I did listen to a lot of Kanye back then). It wasn't until i realized that i had become somewhat of a joke that I realized that there is no bolt of coolness.

Just like there is no bolt of coolness, there is no test for adulthood. There's no license of maturity required, adults are just taller, hairier kids. Originally that thought gave me shivers. Kids in charge of countries, kids in charge of the nuclear weapons, and kids in charge of our society. We are all just children with beards, and a firm belief in the word "adult". But then i turned it on myself, what makes me different now, then back then.

Experience, thats the difference. children don't experience the need for critical thinking, and making choices. As a child everything is laid out for us, and as a teenager we get bored of that and fight for our own choices. As adults we are opened to an infinite amount of choice, each one defining us. 

Ill be honest, having to make choice scares the hell out of me, but i still do it because if I don't, I can no longer define myself, and that scares me a lot more. 

    MORONICALLY YOURS,

                                             Zedman