Growing Up is Funny

My sister recently sent me a video of my baby niece battling her biped-way from the sofa to my sister. She stumbled, used her hands for balance, and then gloated with a proud smile when she finally fell to my sister. I watched the video from a flat in Copenhagen, smiling and audibly cheering. I was happy for just about three seconds. That’s how long that it took to remember that I don’t want my niece to be able to move around. I want my niece to slide about a very little bit, to sit in chairs that she can’t get out of, and to eat a lot. I want her to be able to do these things, to be able to do no other things, and to do these things forever. These are safe things.

Isn’t that mentality sad? Wouldn’t it be grad if we watched all first steps, all grace-less beginnings, with such joy and cheer?

Me “finding myself” has been like an unsupervised toddler learning to walk. Yeah, it’s great when a kid learns to walk. The kid can’t drag ass forever. It’d be impractical, and worse, weird. There are, however, about billion new ways that a mobile kid can screw up. And just like all new walkers, when I discovered myself, or more accurately, discovered that I had a “self” to discover, I behaved like a champion, I scoffed at any notion that I might not be a perfect expert in my new skill, and then I walked my face into the first coffee table that I could find.

I recently had an epiphany. “Self,” I said, “there is a pattern here.”  

When I call the credit card company because I can’t figure out how to pay a bill, or when I’m asking a secretary how to fill out my own W-2, (it only works on women), I have a little thing that I say. I say it because it gets me help, but in this rare instance, I also say it because it’s true: “I’m a child in an adult world.”

And I am!

Each time I’ve done something new, I’ve done it clumsily. But for some reason, I continue to be astonished at my struggles. And honestly, other people seem to be surprised too. But why?

My young niece didn’t skip or dance across the room. She shakily stumbled. Yeah, she’ll one day be the most modest and talented dancer ever, but as of now, I’m just proud of her steps. I loved her and I cheered for her. What an idea.

I’ve decided to stop loathing myself for my stumbling and head knocking. I’m not sure what I’ve expected of myself, or what expectation of others I’ve undertaken, but this is me looking back at them as if through the awkwardly cut and narrated videos of my early childhood. This is me chasing the folly of a freedom forgotten. This is my bare ass, displayed in the face of my own self-assumed seriousness—and yours too. The stumbling steps of a new walker are natural. So too are the stumbling steps of adolescence, college, or young adulthood. Here’s some video of my own silly stumbles:

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New to School

In first grade, shortly after my parents paid for me to enroll in a private school in Macon, Georgia, I had to move my “Behavior Card” from green to red. I had to move my card because Ford Baggerly and I put ice in our pants. Ford Baggerly and I put ice in out pants because there was a girl named Jean who was mean. Jean was mean because her parents, by naming her “Jean”, had made it embarrassingly obvious that they despised her.

So, when Ford Baggerly and I put ice in our pants to gross-out Mean Jean, she told Mrs. Horn. When Mrs. Horn found out what Ford Baggerly and I had done, or more accurately, when Mrs. Horn was made aware of what we had done by our own demonstration of what had done—a demonstration, which we conducted by actually putting ice down our pants again—she made us move our cards from green to red.

Red is the color for the kids who are dolts.

But I don’t have a card to move anymore, and I’m betting Jean’s name is still “Jean”.

New to Independent Mobility: Version 1

Speaking of public school…I was allowed to ride my bike to school in 8^th grade. And by “allowed,” I mean that my parents made me ride my bike to school because I had withheld certain facts from them. And by “withheld certain facts,” I mean that I told my parents that I had basketball practice for a team that I wasn’t even on, so that they wouldn’t know that I actually had been given detention by Ms. Sawcyn for “treating the lesson as if it were a rude distraction from his own conversation.” Her words. I signed the note using my mom’s words, or at least her name, duh. 

Anyway, I ran into my friends’ mom as I was walking into detention. She asked me what I was doing at school so early, and I, of course, told her that I was there “to humor Ms. Sawcyn’s vanity.” And so, as things have pretty much always seemed to go, my friends’ mom went to Publix, found herself in the “Sauces” isle with my mom, and joked to my mom about my comment regarding Ms. Sawcyn. They apparently, really did regard her as being vain.

The humor was lost upon my mother.

We had some rules in our house, but the most important one to my mom was that we should always tell the truth. Unfortunately, I literally cannot understand why anyone would “always tell the truth.” My incompetence is not unfortunate because of the moral consequence, or even because of my mom’s wrath, but because another rule amongst my dad, brother and I, is that anyone who upsets Mamma Bird should be destroyed.

So that was when my parents decided to “allow” me to ride my bike to and from school. And to church. And to baseball practice. And anywhere else that I should should need to go.

I’m a lot of things that I wish that I wasn’t, and I’m not a lot of things that I wish that I was, but one of the things that I am, that I’m okay with being, is buoyant. Not exactly resilient, but buoyant. I just seem to keep popping back up to the surface. Just when the bubbles have stopped popping the surface and everyone around figures that I finally sank for good; bloop. There I am, bouncing around on top of the surface. I didn’t get there by scratching and clawing, or willing and working, but was just sort of shot up by some inherent property.

So, being a buoyant fellow, I met a young lovely on the bike path, made jokes for a couple of weeks, and then was permitted to touch her boobs. And yes, relative to her eighth-grade peers, she had some wonderful boobs. A real good pair of “oh my god, I’m touching boobs,” boobs.

A touch over one week after touching, I found myself in a circle of kids, behind the Walmart, getting punched in the face by The Boob’s Ecuadorian boyfriend. At the time I was still unfamiliar with the various advantages and disadvantages of differing socio-economic situation. If I had understood these advantages and disadvantages, I would not have ridden my bike from my house on the river to “fight” the Ecuadorian Boyfriend who rode his bike from the projects. But he was a good Ecuadorian Boyfriend. The perfect, “oh god, I’m getting punched in the face by an Ecuadorian Boyfriend,” Ecuadorian Boyfriend.

Ecuadorian Boyfriend was last seen working at a gas station. I, on the other hand, am growing my own boobs that I can touch whenever I please.

Boom. Buoyant.

New to Independent Mobility: Version 2

It is impossible to recount the myriad of “mistake” that I made with the freedom of the road. There isn’t a person alive who more enjoys driving, nor is there a person alive who has more abused it. I love it. It’s where I’m the best me. As a person, I’m sort of always going towards someplace and leaving some other place, and when I’m driving I feel like I can, at any moment, in response to any whim, go anywhere. I have an awful car, or at least that’s what you think, but it has so, so much passion. The Neon has never let me down, only I, her. The back two doors don’t have power locks or windows, the seat isn’t “attached” at all, to anything, water leaks into the car from the bottom, the floor mats have been missing for half of a decade, and the shifter is a moronic-metallic-sparkly blue. Basically, The Neon rules. And it’s because of The Neon’s flawless character that I must separate her from all of my vehicular transgressions.

Speaking of those transgressions: I’m not sure if I got my first speeding ticket the first time that I drove, but if I didn’t, it was the second or third. I’ve gotten tickets in six states, and I’ve gotten multiple tickets without leaving the car. I have never been pulled over and not been given a ticket. I’ve also been ticketed for expired tags, failure to stop at a stop sign, ineffective taillight, and of course, for misunderstanding, “don’t drink before driving” as “don’t drive before drinking.”

Driving hasn’t been all stumbles though.

When my best friend’s, girlfriend’s, sister was making a comparison list between her current boyfriend, (who was in a band, better looking than me, funnier than me, and her boyfriend, but a non-car-owner), and myself, I won. She later admitted the list to me, and upon our break-up, informed me that my ability to drive was just about all that I had going for me.

A year after that, being an older and wiser dumb-teenager, I started to keep a blow-up mattress in my trunk so that I could stay out past curfew and chase girls. I never managed to talk a girl into my accommodations, but I did once end up sharing the mattress, which extended from the back of the trunk to the front seats, with two other dudes. So there’s that.

And lastly, my best friend and I went on an epic road trip around the U.S., in The Neon. We tried to ruin her but we couldn’t.

I have a rap-sheet, car-insurance like a mortgage, and experience in jail, but I also have The Neon.

Buoyant.

New to Drinking

Scott Van Pelt, who hosts a daily radio show, often references the term, “Sunday Weird’s.” The term is used as a synoptic tool. There are some “Sunday’s,” or “day-after,” days, that fall into the category of the “Sunday Weird’s.” These are those days when someone, usually between the ages of 18 and 26, wakes up, and immediately thinks, “Weird.”

I will not catalogue the litany of alcohol-related screw-ups that checker my life because I’m no dumber than you are. But I will share a bit of a shameful “Sunday Weird’s” experience:

Study Abroad Center. Valencia, Spain.

I wake up and someone’s next to me. I think, “weird.” I put on my clothes but can’t find my pants. I think, “weird.” I check another room in the same apartment, (an apartment which is not my own), and I cannot find my pants there, but I do find my belt. I think, “weird.” I check the bathroom, a girl is in the shower, she screams, I say, “relax, its not a big deal,” and she tells me that she’ll “bight my balls off” if she ever sees me again. I think, “weird.” I walk down the stairs to my apartment, can’t get into my apartment because my key is in the pocket of my missing pants, I walk all the way down the stairs to the desk clerk, I explain the situation to the clerk, the clerk says that it’s not the weirdest thing he’s seen this morning, and lets me into my apartment where I find someone else’s pants on my floor. I think, “weird.”

I found my pants and don’t have any children or diseases.

Buoyant.

New to: Paying Taxes, Working, Being the Smallest Piece of Shit on The Organizational Chart

 This is the newest of the, “New Responsibility and Mobiliy,” experiences that I’ve encountered. This one sucks. The last year was worse than having to watch this season’s Auburn football team play on a continuous loop while laying in snow while naked. As if having to go to work weren’t enough, these people in the working world don’t understand how big of a deal we were in college. They don’t know that we dated people that a lot of other people wanted to date. They don’t know that our gamer-tag’s strike fear into the hearts of adolescents across the Internet. The suits don’t understand what sort of discipline that it takes to manage a four-hour trip to the library without neglecting one second of social posturing for sake of the distractions of our education.

I have watched the entire “Lord of The Rings” trilogy, made out with Miss Auburn, smoked a cigar, gone undefeated in corn-hole, smoked another cigar, eaten beer, drink-en Ramen, and written a paper that made my prof’s eyes bleed, all in the same day.

Those aren’t the stats of a guy who goes undrafted. Those are, Daniel Snyder sell all the shit you got so you can draft that guy, stats.

And yet, here I sit. Running away. Everything about me has had its ass kicked this last year, and now I’m posting embarrassing things on the Internet while sober. I’m hopeful though, because I’m buoyant.

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They say that we’re “lost.” But we know we’re not. The inherent force that only we know about is growing more and more resistant to the outside forces pushing us further downwards. The moment is coming, and maybe already has, when the compassionate heart of our submerged generation will rise more rapidly than the commentary upon it, and explode far beyond the Gravity-Bound. Keep believing that you’re not as dumb as it all makes you feel. Keep the naïveté that feeds your hope for making a better world. We will rise.

We’re buoyant.