just kids

I’m gonna hit you with some facts.

• The difference between seventeen and twenty one is not that big.
• You’re just a kid.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we’re all really just kids. We’re playing house with our apartments and our boyfriends and our neutral colored clothing, but we stay up too late almost every night and I am mostly content with being naked in my room eating a pop tart. We’re only fooling ourselves, guys.

People spend a solid amount of time trying to be adults (or, as I call them, “real people”). I go to Walmart to buy basic groceries because it’s cheaper there by several cents, and caring about those several cents seems like a “real person” thing to do. My roommates cook large and complex dishes to eat over the course of a week, and it makes them look like the realest people ever. We get jobs. We take out the trash. We do real person things.

It’s easy to forget that we’re all faking it though. I mean, I’m usually aware that I’m faking it, but I’m also hoping no one notices because everyone else seems to have their shit together. It turns out, pretty much all of us are faking it at this point. No one knows which way is up.

Freshmen are a great example of this phenomenon, on a smaller scale. Freshmen, we cool older kids watch you arrive with your parents, and roam the campus in groups of five or more. Some of you assume the unspoken leadership position, organizing trips to the dining hall and suggesting a game of Kings on the weekend. You kind of look like you know what’s going on, but we upperclassmen remember being you, so we know that you are straight frontin’.

Well, cool upperclassmen, we’re frontin’ too. While freshmen ostentatiously pretend to be college kids until it becomes reality, we all run around doing our best adult impersonations. From an outside perspective, it’s probably hilarious, but is it really necessary? I am of two minds about this.

1. You fake it ’til you make it. All of this pretending is necessary in order to actually become a functioning human being. If the freshmen didn’t pretend to be college kids, they might never turn into college kids!
2. What’s the hurry?

There is something to be said for being the age that we are. We can get drunk and play silly games that require us to sing songs and take our clothes off. This is simply not done during other life-stages! We can stay up way too late on the regular. We can find ourselves in the quad at 5 a.m. lying in the grass with a relative stranger, when the sprinklers go off and you scream and run. We can spend an entire evening sitting in our friends’ kitchens watching Selena Gomez music videos. These are not adult person things, but they are real person things — show me a real person who doesn’t have a whole set of crazy college memories and I will show you somebody lame as fuck.

So I think being a real person requires us to slow down on the trying-to-be-a-real-person thing. Deal?

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