On Turning 26

Considering all the tech in my room, I guess I never really outgrew my nightlight, huh?


Router, tv, cable box, BluRay, Roku box … yup, no monsters getting in here.

An End to Innocence

Well, it's finally happened.

Two of my friends, one I've known since middle school and her long-time boyfriend, have gotten engaged. They loved together, lived together, and now they're getting married because it's a wonderful display of grossness and affection.

Oh, and did I mention she's not even pregnant?

See, that's the deciding factor in this becoming the end of my childhood. Someone I went to school with, who is well-educated and financially stable(ish–come on, we're still entry-level), is getting married because she wants to, not because she has to, as has been the case with a couple friends and about 8/9ths of my family for the last 30 years.

Oh, sure, I've had friends do this before, but it was always someone's older sister, or a Facebook post for someone I haven't spoken to since we parted ways after 10th Grade English.

Or, like I said, BABIES HAPPENED.

No more. We are now part of the age group that has jobs and apartments and dogs and gets married because we love somebody and don't even care about the crazy tax breaks.

Look at these responsible bastards.

I thought I was done with all that "So when are you getting married??" B.S. after my younger cousin got knocked up and the line of succession skipped me.

Jeeze, I think I need to go lie down. And then go eat about four boxes of Cocoa Puffs out of a salad bowl and throw water ballons at passing cars or something

Adolescence is a time of subtle nuances and blind, willful self-deception

At the local book store today there was a gaggle of kids about 15 and 16 years old hanging out at the toddler-scale round picnic table in the kids department, as there has been since the dawn of time (for that store I guess). They spent maybe fifteen or twenty minutes simply complaining about hipsters.

Really.

"Oh man, you know 'International Kick A Hipster Day' is soon, right?"

"Really? Oh my gawd! What's Yorktown going to do?!"

Ah, regional jokes. I remember that time, when Yorktown was a hellhole and we were awesome for not living there. It was great until a couple years after I graduated and a girl from my high school stabbed a girl from Yorktown to death because she was standing next to a girl who was sleeping with her boyfriend (who was incidentally also sleeping with said murderess' aunt, whose low-income, subsidized condo they agreed to meet at). But hey, I met a girl in college because of that. And then she got married to a nice Irishman. Yet I digress more than I meant to.

What stuck out in my mind was these children's … shall we say, "personal choice of stylistic expression." They were little scenesters.

Guys: both skinny, black jeans, black graphic tees, jet black straight hair all down and in their faces, black Cons, various facial piercings (ear, lip, brow).

One girl: brunette, baggy men's sweatshirt, dark hair, little round, mostly looking like the guys but pale instead of tan-due-to-ambiguous-heritage. The other: cute as hell, blonde, dark wash blue jeans, teal-and-white striped scoop neck tee with a matching teal knit beanie and pink stripes in her hair, and I think one lip ring.

Irony of them bitching about hipster: Through the roof levels. Not just off-the-charts, it's astronomical. You would have to literally be standing on the surface of a different heavenly body to read the precise scale of a graph if one were to graph irony over time for that precise interval of my walking past these teens.

I really wanted to tell them, too, to explain why everything they thing is shallow like a kiddie pool, all deep and meaningful when it's all you've ever known and yet immediately adjacent to a much grander picture than you've ever experienced.

But of course I didn't.

Firstly, they would have railed against me for calling them hipsters. I would surmise that to them a "hipster" is an unshowered, unshorn hemp-hugger living the bo-ho hobo chique lifestyle in deference to their tidy trust fund, eschewing Starbucks for free-trade grinds they fish out of their uncle's restaurant's dumpster or some such nonsense. I'm positive they would draw a very clear distinction between "hipster" and "scene kid."

Of course they would. No one likes to be labeled, especially a label they despise. What does it matter if they're driving around in a car their parents paid for, wearing $80 jeans and get to go to at least two different Sublime shows every year? No, they're not rich and tasteless. They don't all dress the same and wear ill-fitted clothing. They weren't all totally beaten up in grade school by the same guys who went on to be very good at extracurricular activities that involved running towards something in some capacity. Nope. Totally different.

And in any event, they're 16. They're supposed to think their kiddy pool is the hottest shit this side of Memento and Donnie Darko. They know how to swim without their swimmies and they're getting cocky. They've even learned how to look like they're just hanging out on the side of the pool when in fact they've very strategically found that one spot where the water jet is….

Who are we to pull them off of that water jet and throw them, boner-clad, into the deep end without so much as a swim test and a hot lifeguard upon whom to fixate? Let them grow up and be embarrassed about how they dressed and how they thought they knew everything when they were really provincial and intolerant.

We all were 16 once.

Childhood Rules You Can Disregard

• "Always wash your fruit." Screw that. Pesticides make the fruit all tart and delicious.
  
  
• "Never run with scissors" and "hold them by the point." Hold them however the hell you think will keep the sharp, stabby parts away from your torso and face should you trip and fall. And get them wherever they need to go in a reasonable amount of time!
  
  
• "Never talk to strangers." Then how am I supposed to make friends and meet new people? Get a job? Live outside of my mother's basement?
  
  
• "Don't light things on fire." Please.
  
  
• "No running by the pool!" Then how the fuck am I going to splash a bigger cannonball?
  
  
• "Clean your plate; there are starving children in [distant Third World location]." And how is me being a glutton and giving myself a stomach ache helping them? Why don't we just take our leftover tuna casserole and FedEx it over to Africa or China or wherever and put some meat on their bones.
  
  
• "Don't buff the dog," "No grappling hooks in the bananas," and "You can't drink milk while running." Pretty sure these were only specific to my childhood, but I'm a man now and I'll do what I damn well want.

On Knowing Your Limitations

I think when I finally get my own place without any family or roommates, I'm going to conveniently forget to hook up my cable for a few weeks.

It'd just be really convenient for finishing the six-year backlog of unread novels sitting by my bed.


On a separate note, these are the types of plans I make. In some distant, nebulous future time, I own my own house in which I forget to turn on the cable, hang pop art in the hallways and keep an old motorcycle in the garage under a blue tarp.

How I get this house? I think someone eventually pays me for typing this stuff. That's never really been more a concern than interior decoration.

This is the exact couch I've always imagined myself owning if I get an apartment, except in scratchy fabric, not upholstery. It's a basic Ikea model, incredibly uncomfortable and pretty much what they had on The Daily Show for the first ten years of interviews. I think they auctioned that one off for charity.