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Put That In Your Easy-Bake Oven and Burn It
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“I had corn dogs, chocolate cake and rum for breakfast yesterday. Then I went on a hike, and explored an abandoned mine shaft that I don’t think I was supposed to enter. I didn’t have to get anyone’s permission or tell anyone where I was going. Later, I touched a girl with my penis, and nobody yelled at me or sent me to talk to the councilor about it. I watched a scary movie that had boobies and swears in it, and then I stayed up until 2 AM because I didn’t feel like going to bed.

“Childhood has nothing on adulthood. Being a grown-up is an awfully grand adventure.” — My new favorite MeFi commenter

June 2, 2008 / Uncategorized

3 comments

Screw that. Maybe I’m jaded, but doing all of those things from the ages of 15 to 18, whether you get away with them or not, is WAY better than doing them between 25 to 28, when they all (while still fun) make you feel tired, sore, and sometimes sad.

The best part of childhood is breaking rules, not having them.

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I hear your point, Tim, but I’m challenging my own hazy nostalgia on this one. Sure, the farther I reach back into my childhood memories, the sweeter they get: picking kumquats from a neighbor’s yard, entire days spent in PJs beating The Secret of Mana with my cousin, drinking Minute Maid citrus punch after a Saturday soccer game … you just don’t quite get moments so uncomplicatedly good anymore.

But if I press the point with my memory, I also have to concede that a non-trivial portion of childhood was actually hugely boring. Really, how much time was spent just waiting for my parents to do stuff, like pick me up from school and finish running errands at the grocery store? And I’m struggling to find all that many instances when breaking the rules resulted in some golden happy moment of fun, beyond the minor thrill of the rule-breaking itself.

The autonomy of adulthood is entirely underrated.

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Let me backtrack a little bit from what I said before, or at least clarify it. I don’t think childhood or adolescence are better than adulthood. I think that even when I was 12, the prospect of corn dogs and booze for breakfast wasn’t what was selling me on being a grown-up. I guess when I think about the autonomy of adulthood, I think that its pleasures are pretty specific to it, and different from the things that maybe you wanted to do when you were a kid but your parents or teachers or whoever wouldn’t let you. Something different from staying up late, touching boobies or whatever.

If you say instead, being an adult means getting to choose where you want to live, that your friends are based on common interests rather than just who lives in your neighborhood, finding somebody to love, building a future, and having a bigger sense of the world, then yeah — the autonomy of adulthood is tremendous. I don’t think that’s because those things are exactly better or nobler, even though I’d argue that they are, but they are more specifically adult.

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