Old School

I was thinking about time today. It occurred to me, halfway through a post-hangover Chipotle run (you know how food tastes super super delicious when you first get over a hangover? Is that just me?) that there was a time in recent memory where it was like a big fucking deal to be able to finish a burrito in one sitting. We used to sit in awe of one another's ability to eat...and this was the same time in my life when my friends and I would hear rumors about people "doing drugs" and recoil in fear and shock. But now I laugh at the burrito quest as I demolish my carnitas: all of the causes I championed and things I believed in when I was, say, fourteen, are now little more to me, retrospectively, than overzealous silliness or self-righteousness. I even look at my little sister, who is this beautiful young thing immersed in a world very different from the one I occupied at her age, and I can't even find a shred of sympathetic connection. Do you actually forget what it feels like to be a certain age, once you move past it? Is it like pain in that way, as in your sense memory won't retrieve it no matter how much of the circumstance you recall? 

I don't know why but it makes me sad...especially during this summer where I have totally subverted the static of my pre-college life; I've been chasing the same boys, making the same money, doing the same jobs now for most of high school, yet everything feels different now that I'm older. If this is supposed to be "perspective" I feel shortchanged: it feels more like prejudice, a narrowing of my mind...like I'm growing out of my blissful, imaginative Peter Pan complex and entering Boringville and Practicalland (nyuk nyuk nyuk). I mean, I think about real estate and casual sex the same way I used to think about Good Charlotte songs and elaborate games of Barbies...and while the former are arguably more important now, they weren't then. It's kind of silly. Maybe maturity is just a really nice, fancy way to say "pretending we are getting cooler while really just allowing ourselves more leeway because we have power and are secretly shocked at our own inabilities to actually learn from our mistakes".  Maybe I don't believe in adults.