2000-10-09 - 1:30 AM

As of today, I officially leave the larval stage of adulthood.

See, I see many stages of adulthood. The first comes in the rebellious teenage years. I don’t actually count this as a “stage of adulthood,” but this is basically how it works: As a fairly mature young person, the older teenager is offended at the idea of being a “kid.” If one is a kid, then s/he is immature, stupid, and not ready to make decisions for themselves. So the fairly mature teenager is hurt at the idea of being called a “kid.” Unfortunately, there is nothing that one can be called but kid or adult, so attempting to not be offensive to the teenager, older people refer to him/her as being “adult,” though in their minds the teenager is neither adult nor child.

The first real turning point in adulthood is the 18th birthday. At this point, the government and society in general officially sees the person as an adult for the first time. You can vote, you can smoke, you’re an adult. But you’re still not a real adult. You are looked up to by only those who are unofficial adults. All other individuals still view at least to a certain extent as not being an adult yet. It’s like when someone thinks they’re good with a computer because they can check their Hotmail, and the rest of the computer literate community views them as someone with the potential to be computer literate, but is not as of yet. The eighteen-year-old is a neo-adult, a larval adult.

Then you hit the pupal stage of adulthood. At the ages of 19-20, you are still making the transition into full-fledged adulthood, but are truly considered an adult. You are not a full-fledged adult, as you have not hit that all-too-important age of 21. (The moment you can drink legally. whee.) At 19 and 20, you are no longer the *incredibly immature* age of 18, so you are actually somewhat respected by adults as an adult. Twenty is much more important than nineteen, because you are “in your twenties,” so while you are still in the same basic stage of adulthood, you’ve shed your child-like skin of having your two-digit age begin with a one. *gasp*

Then at twenty-one, you become a full-fledged adult. Everyone who knows your age considers you an adult, even if you are less mature than your average fifteen-year-old is, you’re an adult and the fifteen-year-old isn’t. It kind of sucks that the world can work that way, but it does. So while many twenty-one-year-olds I have known spent their days drunk, unemployed, prejudiced, and stupid, the world still sees them as an adult while I’m just starting to get there. At least I’m not a *lowly* eighteen-year-old any more. Well, actually for a few more hours I technically am.

So right now, I’m just a very tired eighteen-year-old who’ll be nineteen before he wakes up, feels like he has the joints of a fifty-year-old, wants to be ten again, and is probably boring the snot of whoever is reading this. So this isn’t my best writing on this site, but I just got royally mind-expletived by the movie “Lost Highway” and can’t quite think really clearly, so I feel I have an excuse. Dick Laronte is dead.