As a kid, you except realizations to come in lightning packages, storming down with a bang that make you stop dead in your tracks and see the world in a different light. As you grow up, you learn to play dead when they saunter by. Little did I know that growing up isn’t as fun as they made it sound when I was a kid, I feel ripped off and the only reason I’m not suing is because I don’t know who to sue and am not grown up enough to know how to hire a solicitor just yet. Caution is advised for kids who stumble upon this post, I’d recommend you keep an inhaler close by because I will not be held responsible or, what you will come to know as being legally implicated, for having a kid think that if they hold their breath long enough they won’t turn into what I shall elaborate as the woes of grown-upsy.
I now know that time travel is possible, and it’s not just because of the fact that I slept for 18 hours that were so strategically lodged in the natural order of waking hours between Thursday and Saturday to have me skip Friday altogether, it’s the little déjà vus that have you standing there and seeing your younger self getting the same talk or lost in the same problem, only to be sucked into the present by the talker’s baffled face at your utter lack of reaction, which is another pooper, you hardly have any fits because your experience made it possible for you to be ‘mature’ about shit that would have had the kid you swing a baseball bat in the person’s face and not go to jail or be held remotely responsible for caving it in. For the record, you can’t swing a baseball bat at people anymore either, and I still haven’t begun about the lost fun parts.
I now also know that when grownups say they’re busy, they’re actually busy. It’s usually a fleeting change but if you pay close attention, you realize that kids don’t really know what busy is outside of the realm of not wanting to hang out with that person and not wanting to admit that they don’t wanna hang out with that person. It’s funny hearing myself tell people I’m busy, and actually meaning it.
You also know that you could miss a social gathering because your overworked brain thought it plausible to have a big bang theory marathon just so it can fart around in its folds and not be required to perform the chore of shutting down and letting you sleep before it gets its own playtime, extorting you to yield by convincing you that you’re a Leonard and having you stay up just to find clues that’ll prove to you that you’re not a Leonard. You know that running through sprinklers feels like a dinosaur peeing on you and actually consider opting out for a relevant amount of time that kid you would slap you for, not to mention that you start to not roll down the car window so it wouldn’t mess up your hair. I used to make fun of chicks who did that, now I do it myself knowing that the rush of air at 60 mph would turn my short afro into a bouncy pompom. You’ll also lose your innocent and seemingly god-given effortless ability of spotting right from wrong or good people from bad people because by the time this post makes sense, you’ll have gone through every single thing you ever judged and pointing it out would only have you realize that you just called yourself an asshole.
You learn that the key to understanding personal statements in news articles is all in skipping the nots, you find a chocolate smear on your thigh and it automatically registers as one of the reasons why you can’t get a date when kid you would’ve probably licked it off, you know how to professionally tell a person to shove it and not lose your job, or have a fight at a restaurant over a wrong order without having the waiter spit in your food.
You learn that the whole ‘when one door closes, another one opens’ shit is only possible if they’re connected by relays, there’s a motion sensor installed or the room is pressure-stabilized and the evacuation at one end incurs an equal and opposite reaction at the other.
You learn that Spanish doesn’t have a word for ‘fuck off’, and many other famous cuss words, only to come to the realization that getting angry in Spanish requires you to be fluent enough to form a complex set of elaborate interconnected adjectives that together imply a pejorative context, and the things that come to mind after ‘how do people get mad in Spanish’ are ‘Somebody should have told me before I started learning it’ and ‘It’s a plan so you don’t score any latinas’, in that order.
And the most annoying change of all, when you think before you actually do shit, you start to know better. You don’t walk in some people’s shoes because even your toes knew better and you miss thinking about something only to come up with nothing of merit and do it anyway only to have a great story to tell the kids and something to smile about when you’re an old fart. That’s when things stop being fun, and it’s not because you stop doing things that are fun, it’s because the things that used to be fun are, by a twist of age and experience, not so fun anymore. Yes, kids, you’ll be fun-uly celibate. And don’t google celibate, you’ll only know that exists when it hits you in the face with a pillow and have you grateful for affording airbags.
You also know that everything you think you know now may change in a couple of months, because grownups are complicated, and being one is like being given a contraption that you’re supposed to figure out without the manual that has been lost somewhere down the generations that have manhandled it. People don’t say what they mean or do what they love, and they don’t necessarily do the opposite of that either in case you’re looking for the easy way out. You’re aware that you have no idea what you’re getting into but you wanna get into it anyway, only to grow old and wish you lost your speech functions at goo goo ga ga, and that’s when you’ll realize that you can’t be a kid again because it’s generally frowned upon once you’ve lost the kid license.
And because you’ve seen it all, you’ll probably never have one of these moments, that you’ll come to miss, again:
You also lose your faith in humanity when you realize you’ve lived long enough to see Snoop Dogg turn into Snoop Lion and read the news because you have to not because you like to see people blow shit up out of the middle east. You have a full-fledged to-do list that doesn’t include decorative slots filled with ‘take a shower’ and ‘download tech n9ne album’ to make you look busy. You purchase books that are convenient for escaping social obligations, meaning the chubby ones that you can look engrossed into enough to have the approacher think twice about stepping into your antisocial bubble, and it doesn’t work half the time and you can’t tell them to go away because you’re not a kid anymore and that would fuck shit up.
And here’s the major party pooper, you actually start to care about what might happen if you fuck shit up.
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