Freakouts.

[kageotogi]

As my friend and co-worker Karen approaches her college graduation, she has started to realize that she is going to be entering the real-world workforce -- as an elementary school teacher. She told me last week that, thinking back, her elementary school teachers were not really all that old. They were old comparatively, yes, but most of those teachers were in their twenties or so. Karen is amazed by this and has come to realize that when she starts to teach, her students will think she is old.

When I was first told this story, I told her about my incident with a certain cousin who was a great deal older than I. I was nine, I suppose, and my cousin was in his mid-twenties. I asked how old he was and, when he told me, I declared that he was "halfway to halfway to being dead", because when you're nine, everyone drops dead at the age of a hundred. (This, obviously, is not true. I was nine. Shh.) In any case, this upset my cousin a little and I was scolded by my mother and told never to tell someone that ever again. (I, of course, did not listen to her. I've simply turned my fascination with being "halfway to halfway to being dead" to fiction rather than real life.)

My roommate, our darling slyfox78, has a slight problem with her age. (Sorry, honey!) She is in her twenties. When the cicadas came out a few years ago, she did the math and was upset when she realized how old she would be when the cicadas came back. It probably didn't help that I chose that time to have her read Tim Allen's I'm Not Really Here, a book I found funny and she called "a how-to guide on having a mid-life crisis".

I have never had a problem with age. People are older than me, people are younger than me, people are the same age as me, people are the same age as my brother(s), people are the same age as my friends, people are the same age as so-and-so... Numbers never really bugged me, perhaps because I am so terrible at math that numbers completely fail to mean anything at all. It was my thirteenth birthday? Sppsh. So what? Sixteenth? No problem. Nineteenth? Okay. Twentieth?

...okay, I had a slight problem with twenty. But not until today. Here's why.

I am writing a paper for my Neo-Lit class, as those of you who have managed to catch me on AIM and heard my freakouts already know. This paper is not an easy paper and I didn't exactly wait until the last minute, but I can't write things out of order and I'm having a very hard time starting it -- so very little is getting written right now. When I did finally write a sentence or two, I sent a message to mortenavida. The message was in all caps and read something like this:

KageOtogi: AH, I HAVE A SENTENCE THANK GOD!
KageOtogi: ...um... minor teenage freakout. Ignore me.

It was at that point that I realized I had stopped being a teenager three days ago and could not, technically, have a teenage freakout. Unless, of course, I was using the term metaphorically. Which, in most cases, I do not. I realized this and amended my earlier claim with the words:

KageOtogi: >.< Except I can't have teenage freakouts anymore. Minor twenty-year-old freakout. >.<
o aleatorio: isn't twenty a little old ^_~

Twenty-year-old freakout, I realized, does not sound anywhere near as funtastic as teenage freakout. So I had another minor twenty-year-old freakout and passed the message along to pereppi:

KageOtogi: ...so I just realized that I'm old. >.<
Pereppi: Aww.
Pereppi: *pat pat*

After I described the situation and freaked out a moment longer, Lauren pointed out that I could have a minor adolescent freakout if I wanted, because adolescence does not technically end until the age of twenty-two. My crisis was thusly averted. The number suddenly stopped mattering and I was A-OK once again. Swanktastic. I don't know what I'll do when I turn twenty-three and have to change from "adolescent freakout" to "mid-twenties freakout", but we'll see what happens when it happens. ^__^

This post was brought to you by the letter 'o'.

Comments

[kageotogi.livejournal.com]

Swanktastic. ^__^ Yay Doctor Southerly!