I Don't Wanna Grow Up

I don't know. Being back here after all this time...It feels strange somehow. I mean a lot has happened since my last post. I got myself a driver's license, a boyfriend and a fancy-schmancy degree. In Latin. Perhaps I have outgrown this blog. Maybe it's time to put the final nail in the coffin of this childish fodder and just commit to writing a deeply disturbing novella so brilliant, no one will read it until I die respectably of alcoholism at the respectable age 29. Maybe I should say goodbye to the less respectable Zac Efron...goodbye to the endless parade of cheerleading* movies...goodbye to the Muppet singalongs...goodbye to the sparkles...

...Oh, the sparkles.

Nah, that can't be it. Respectability be damned. (You know I could never quit you, Zaky! Call me!) It must just be that my creative juices have all but dried up in my long blogging hiatus. I submit the fact that I just used the words "juices" and "dried up" in the same sentence as evidence toward this case.

But really? I am so not ready to be a grown-up. No one who slows down when she passes the High School Musical themed notebooks in the office supply aisle in Target is ready for her own business cards. If I learn one thing from my year as a member of the Lutheran Volunteer Corps, it will be how incredibly under-prepared I am to be a productive member of adult society.

Do you guys remember when we all moved into our dorm rooms freshman year, all dewy and starry eyed? We tore the plastic encasing our brand new pop-up hampers, gingerly stuck dry erase boards on our doors and thought to ourselves, "this is it. We're finally on our own. This self-purchased bottle of laundry detergent is my ticket to the adult world." Kids, I'm telling you right now, we have been lying to ourselves. There is WAY more to adulthood than having to staple your papers before you bring them to class.

First of all, did you know that you have to go grocery shopping every week in the real world? I mean, I suspected milk and bread could go bad. I saw numerous graphic posters on the process at my third-grade science fair. But, it turns out that everything else can grow mold too! Tomatoes, Broccoli, rice (though, to be fair, that's just prison-style sake if you're a glass-half-full kind of person) garbage cans, lunch meat, bedsheets...You have to clean or eat all of these things regularly or throw them out. And money doesn't grow on trees (though mold probably grows on money) so it's good to not have to buy new bedsheets every other week. Also, most people don't even have an unlimited supply of soft-serve and a sprinkle bar in their kitchens.

Adulthood: Zero. College cafeteria: Like, 48.

Second, bathrooms don't clean themselves. When your mother said this to you, she wasn't kidding. When I informed my mother my "chore"one week was cleaning bathrooms, she asked me, "Caitlin, do you even know how to clean a bathroom?" When I said "um...nope." she replied, "I have failed as a mother."

When I was little, "bathroom cleaning" seemed like a mysterious cocktail concocted from baking soda, rubber gloves and mom jeans. The cocktail also seemed kind of redundant to me because, hello: Bathrooms clean people...why can't they clean themselves too? Well, it turns out they can't because human beings are filthy and disgusting. Within nine days our brand new tub had a gray ring around it and it stopped draining completely. We took measures to correct the situation with drain-o and something called a "hair strainer." I assure you, it's as gross as it sounds.

Finally, did you guys know that adults have to take themselves to the doctor? Remember the days of shuffling into urgent care and just plopping yourself down in a chair with a five year old copy of Highlights while your mom filled out paperwork at the receptionists desk? Yeah, well, those days are gone. I know, I know. many of you guys have been hip to this for a while. You've all been hauling your own asses to the campus clinic every flu season since freshman year. But I have managed to avoid it thus far.

And I was counting on avoiding it indefinitely. I figured I'd just not contract any ailments that couldn't be cured by the internet and a frozen pack of peas. Then, I'd die a peaceful death with no medical cause at age 130. I thought this was a pretty good plan. So imagine my surprise when, four weeks into my new job, I fell down the stairs and listened to my ankle crackle like a bowl of Rice Krispies. I managed to keep it together for a while until I realized that, yes, I was going to have to visit the doctor. Luckily, no one was around to witness my meltdown, but if they had, our dialogue might have gone something like this:

Friendly co-worker: Oh, honey, does it hurt that bad?

Me: No (pathetic sniff), it doesn't hurt at all. I'm crying because (sniff sniff) I have no concept of how health insurance works. I called the pharmacy the "pill library" until I was ten.

Co-worker: The pill library?

Me: What? An insurance card and a library card have a lot of similar qualities to a thirteen year old.

Co-worker: I thought you said 'ten.'

Me: Oh noooooooooooo...

Co-worker: Okay, okay. Don't cry. I'm sure a lot of kids get insurance cards mixed up with library cards. Even some, um, slower adults. Anyway, do you know the name of your insurance provider? How about the name of your plan or your ID number...

Me: Are you kidding? My insurance card hasn't come in the mail yet and I can barely even remember my own phone number without singing a little song in my head. (singing to the tune of Twinkle Little Star:) two eight seven six zero five one, That is my...phone number.

Co-worker: What? That doesn't even rhyme --

Me: I want my mommy.

Eventually I grown-uped up and called a number of resources to find out about my health-care situation. OK, so one of them was my mommy. I'm taking baby steps. None of the calls I made mattered because the health-care facility I went to was not about to provide me with any coverage without an insurance card. Luckily, I qualified for worker's comp. since I fell down the stairs on the job.

Since I still had a very loose grasp on the logistics of health insurance, I felt like a little old con-lady who trips outside of Olive Garden and sues the franchise for forgetting to salt the sidewalks. Later, my mother -- definitive resource that she is -- assured me that the money would come out of my employer's insurance, not by boss's children's lunch boxes. This was a great comfort to me once the whole ordeal was over. At the time though, every bleeb of the x-ray machine just sounded more and more like little Maggie's sigh of disappointment as she peeked inside her brown bag to find nothing but a hard boiled egg and a few packets of non-dairy creamer.

"Luckily," Nothing was broken (in my ankle) and I was out of the brace they gave me within a week. And, I guess if I had to learn about health insurance, there could have been more painful ways to do it. Still, I think my original plan of just never getting hurt was far superior. Let me impart what little wisdom I have gleaned from the real world so far on you little whippersnappers: don't fall down stairs.

Oh well. I guess it's all just part of growing up. But, if you can avoid it, I wouldn't recommend doing that either.


*The spell-check on this program does not recognize "cheerleading" as one word. I just wanted to clarify that there is no mistake on my part. If letting the words "cheer" and "leading" co-exist in spaceless, sparkle fingering** harmony is wrong, I don't want to be right. But I mean, it didn't recognize "Zac" or "Efron" as properly spelled words either so...how reliable could it be, right?

**Can we please file "sparkle fingering" -- along with the "withered juices" incident -- under "things we pretend I never said?"