A toast to adulthood.
Delivered at my first — and probably also last — Adult Club Banquet.
I spend what feels like an unreasonable amount of time worrying that they’re going to catch on that I’ve been faking it this whole time and revoke my adult card. Which I admitted to my dad the other day. He replied with a knowing look.
And, you know what? That helped.
Not to change the subject, but, you know, who are we talking about here? What happened today is I just downloaded the Accuweather App. It’s nice. It does little helpful things like it has an animation when the sun comes out from behind a cloud. Which saves a lot of time.
I can tell you, it’s a huge relief. If there’s one thing that just ruins my day, that I cannot recover from for hours, it’s the need to glance out the window to see if it’s sunny. So I’m glad I have the Accuweather App to tell me when the sun comes out.
This cossetting has grown so endemic that it’s our basic state, you know? There’s something in the air that seems to say that we’re all so worried to be surprised that we need to be warned that the sun has come out.
So of course I’m worried about my adult status getting revoked. Of course I am. Accuweather tells me that the sun has come out, and not to worry. The news machine tells me that the president may be having a stroke, and not to worry. The science machine tells me that they have probably been putting carcinogens in literally everything for the last thirty years, and not to worry. Just don’t worry. Let us take care of it. Go eat your Pringles.
The entire universe has been unified in its efforts to tell me that I can’t handle reality, in spite of surviving in it this long.
I suppose that the almighty They in the Sky who are responsible for this culture of nerfing the universe, so that I’ll never cut myself on the sharp edges of anything, would tell me that it’s a fluke that I’ve survived this long. I’m one of the lucky ones, They’d say.
I’m one of the lucky ones! It’s a jungle out there. Everything wants to maim, defame, and in general eat me to death or near death. It’s amazing that so many infants make it through the grinder which is modern living!
It’s completely ridiculous, though. I’ve said it before: for a lot of people, survival is mandatory. And as for all the people who need to work at it, the news machine tells me not to worry about them.
So of course I worry that I’ll be caught pretending to cope. I’ve never had to cope before in my life. I have no idea how to do it. My grandparents were graduates of the school of hard knocks, and my parents closed that school, and now I get to live in a world made of memory foam and cotton candy, only not anymore because cotton candy makes you fat and memory foam probably gives you cancer, so it’s not even fun anymore.
I’ve never been told how to be an adult. As far as I can tell, all that’s happened is I bumbled around for a couple decades, and now I’ve been scheduled to show up with a hangover and third-day stubble, and it’s expected of me that I’m already equipped with all the expertise necessary to bitch about Monday.
That does seem to be the only pertinent qualification of being an adult, if the conversations I’ve had for the last ten years indicate anything. The main concern of adulthood is to make it clear that, basically, I understand that the beginning of the work week is the Devil.
Unless I’m missing something and there’s a lot more significance than there appears to be to all this absenting ourselves from blame till the next opportunity to get black-out drunk.
I just feel like there was an instruction manual called “How to be an Adult” that got passed around and everyone saw it but me. That’s how the world feels to me.
I have no idea how to be a functioning adult. So I’ll raise my glass to getting away with faking it till they catch me.
