Phrase of the month: "Your mom".
I grew up over Christmas. My home life is, as they say in The Breakfast Club, "unsatisfying". Thank goodness I am back in my bubble, at school, away from the cares which put me in my grown-up mode.
Unconsciously I have been making efforts to differentiate myself from those with the real responsibility, outside of dorm walls and the gates of campus. Older visitors and professors are the "grownups"; singing silly songs is mandatory for traveling on foot anywhere, and singing along with the radio is mandatory in the car; while some think about moving off campus next year, I am still thinking about bringing unicorn bedsheets and a canopy for my roommate and me to share next year.
However, I can see the advantages of looking respectable. Imagine waiting to be helped in a department store for forty-five minutes because you and your friends are dressed youthfully--perhaps too young to be spending any kind of money on a pair of shoes. Our consumerist culture has not reached a consumate equality in treatment of potential customers. No skin off my nose, but I know where I'll go to shop for shoes in the future.
See, I'm learning stuff all the time as a kid. And when I was younger and felt less decorated in cynicism by interaction with the outside world, learning was really fun. But academics have begun to bore me; I am almost ready to go out into the real world.
Almost.
Before I get domestic, see the world, return home to my parents, pick up a sugar daddy in Atlantic City, live homeless on a streetcorner, or camp in the mountains, I've got to go through a few more bars of irregularly selected, dubiously memorized They Might Be Giants songs with a group of friends who are balanced on the same edge I'm looking over.