All Growed Up?

Do any of you feel like grown-ups? No, I said feel LIKE grown-ups, not feel UP grown-ups. I’d hate to be accused of promoting inappropriate touchyness. Any way, touching isn’t what I wanted to touch upon today. I know you ARE grown-ups, but do you FEEL like grown-ups? Perhaps it was my death experience, which I detailed yesterday, or the fact that I spent 2 hours eating at Lucy and Ethel’s ‘pretend restaurant’ dining on plastic steak and ice cream on Sunday, but whatever the reason, I still don’t feel like a grown-up.

I am just months away from 35, but don’t really feel like an adult. Does that make sense to any of you? Now I know I am not the tallest dude on the ranch, but there has to be more to it. Yes, I have to look up at most people, but that can’t be it. I have a family, I have a corporate drone job and leave the house every day wearing a real tie (as opposed to the clip-on type that I want to wear), I have bills and I even have plenty of that four-letter word: responsibility. Ok, since you are such a go-getter you have probably already figured out that ‘responsibility’ contains at least 6 letters, but surely you view the word in the same context as ##$%$# and %&%* or even $%%$#()^%@#, just as I do. I meant 4-letter word in the comparative sense, not the literal sense. If I had meant it in the literal sense, I would have had to spell responsibility as ‘resp.’ That would truly be a 4-letter word, though it might not make any sense, just like the majority of this paragraph, or the report I had to turn in this morning that dealt with financials and stats and other squirrely stuff like that. When doing that type of report with so many numbers in it, you just eventually succumb to the temptation of throwing random figures in there to see if anyone notices them. Ok, I’m kidding. Or am I?

I can’t help but think that I’m not the only one who feels this way (about being a grown-up not fabricating numbers on reports). I’m sure most of the readers here (hello and thank you to all 8 of you) have at least one of the following: family, real job, bills, a car, a spouse, a pet, a velvet painting of Elvis, a subscription to Junior AARP Magazine and yes, responsibility (although if you don’t, can we trade places for just a day?). You know, those things that qualify us to be adults. Is there some magic experience that makes us officially adults? That moment when we hear chimes and then go ‘wow, I’m grown up now’ and are greeted by a marching band and the huge, cardboard ‘key’ to adulthood or maybe a symbolic grandfather clock?

Well, it doesn’t HAVE to be a parade or clock, perhaps it could be a pie or a commemorative shirt or maybe even cash. Yeah, ‘Growed-up Bucks’ would be kinda cool. Of course so would getting to spend a day with Tina Fey (yes, that rhymed. I’ve been trying to bust my mad rhyming skillz lately), but like they say when it comes to Tina Fey (I know, I rhymed again), ‘you can’t always get what you want’ (Rolling Stones). Did you remember to lower your voice when you said ‘Rolling Stones?’ It was kind of a test to see if you remember my song title post from last week. I have soooo many bonus points to hand out before the end of the month…

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining that I don’t feel like an adult, I’m just not sure I want to wake up one day at 53 years of age and have it hit me like ‘oh blurg, I’m an adult now, how the wrinkles did that happen?’ I’m usually good with surprises, but I don’t know if ‘hey you’re old now’ is the type of surprise I want. And before anyone fires up the ole email account, yes I did use 53, but that doesn’t mean I consider 53 to be old, it’s just a random number I threw out there like oh, ‘007.’ Ok, ‘007’ isn’t random; it’s a number I use a lot because it was James Bond’s number. ‘3’ would be a random number. No, I gotta be honest; that’s not random either. That was Dale Earnhardt’s and Babe Ruth’s number. 13,456 would be random, but it wouldn’t make much sense in this context, contextually speaking.

Lately I have tried to do things to help make me feel like an adult, but they haven’t worked yet. I tried to yell at all the neighborhood kids when they were on my lawn, but I ended up playing tag with them. I got ready to wear a short-sleeve dress shirt to work, but gave in to peer pressure (for lack of a much better word) when Lucy and Ethel told me I looked funny. I sat in front of the window staring at all of the gopher mounds in my front yard and started mumbling about how I plan on getting that dang gum vermin. In fact, I’ve taken to mumbling a lot lately. Heck, I’ve even tried eating softer foods and I actually wore socks with my sandals while mowing that yard a few weekends ago. I thought for sure that driving 45 in the fast lane and yelling at everyone who kept zooming by me while honking and saluting me as ‘#1’ would make me feel older, but it just made me realize how much gas I was saving by going slower (we all gotta do our part to be green ya know). One day I even took the good, took the bad, took them both and thought I finally had the facts of life, but it just made me remember how much I liked Blair when I was younger and that just made me lose my concentration. She and I share the same birthday, you know…

Despite two open heart surgeries, having been in the emergency room at least 8 times to have my heart rhythm reset, taking enough medication each morning and night to be able to stock a small mid-western main street pharmacy and visiting the cardiologist more times in a year than most 80-year olds, I still don’t feel like a real grown-up. It’s not that I feel like Peter Pan or that I am pretending, I just don’t feel like a full-fledged adult. Again, surely some of you feel the same way too?

Although, when I stop to think about it, I have never hosted a dinner party with wine or held a bunco night. Maybe those are rites of passage into adulthood? I have also never thrown a fondue party, joined a fancy lodge with a secret handshake or joined a bowling league. Maybe that’s the missing ingredient to being an adult? After all, Fred Flinstone did those things and he was certainly a grown up. Barney? Not so much. Fred was always bossing him around, thereby squelching his maturity and blossoming adult independence.

Perhaps there are things that need to be GIVEN UP instead of EXPERIENCED that will mark the passage into ‘big boydom.’ I suppose I could eliminate doing the happy dance, or the pony, or yes, even the Macarena, at work. Maybe it’s time that Lucy and Ethel get in trouble for being mischievous on their own instead of getting intro trouble for something I started doing with them. As much as I dread it, I COULD stop rhyming all the time, stop insisting that the family goes to Disneyland 2-3 times a week, or even stop making the toy aisle the first section I visit at Target. While having a PEZ collection is a glaring obstacle to adulthood, getting rid of it is strictly forbidden by my code of conduct. Another obstacle to being a big boy is adding the letter ‘y’ to the endings of most of my words, like saying wishy-washy-y or fanatic-y (as in ‘yeah, she got all fanatic-y about it). One could argue that asking themselves ‘what would Homer or Captain Kirk do’ when faced with a serious decision automatically excludes one from adulthood. While that might be true, at some point, you kinda gotta go with what got ya here, you know?

I realize I should now wrap this up since this post is starting to exceed the bounds of acceptable length and that just results in people tuning out (or actually in this case, clicking out). Trust me; I’ve done a lot of comment analysis. Wait, that sounded pretty mature. Ok, it’s settled. As long as I use fairly big words arranged in an official sounding manner, I can consider myself to be all grown-upy. Dangit, I just couldn’t resist it…