Tuesday, May 21, 2013

No, YOU'RE A Mid-Life Crisis!


Today was a world only big kids live in. 

For full effect, download “A Hazy Shade of Winter” by Simon & Garfunkel and play at maximum volume throughout the duration of this post. 

Days like these can be described as tedious. 

Or repetitive.

Or lackluster. 

Or think of some other synonym for “old and boring” and insert it into the above sentence. 

You know what kinds of days I’m talking about don’t you?  The days when the majority of your attention is focused on filing the correct 1040-D form to recognize your business as an LLC with the IRS and make it so you’re tax exempt, or when you have a staring contest with your computer monitor trying to figure out if the retention data from Fall 2011 to Fall 2012 is comparable with the same retention data pulled from Fall 2012 to Spring 2013. Today was a day when dress slacks and cornflower blue ties replaced cutoff jeans and a Weezer T-shirt. 

That last paragraph was major boring crap, I know.  I’m surprised you’re actually still reading this blog after suffering through that.  If you’re still with me this far, well then I applaud your dedication dear reader, and hopefully these next 500 words won’t bore you out of your stinking mind.  I’ll spice it up and talk about things like Root Beer floats and closet make out sessions. 

Those are things the youngsters inside us all appreciate, right?

Seriously, today was a day where I think a few gray hairs were conceived beneath my own scalp.  It wasn’t a stressful day or a day of pure boring agony, it was just a day where the big kid on campus took a cricket bat to the face of the little kid inside me and told him not to come out to play, and if he did, oh, he knew what was coming to him.  Today was a day where plaid button-ups with wrinkles gave up their Mazda Miata and settled down for the old Chrysler Town & Country. 

50-year old waste of time: “Yeah, so I think I’m gonna go ahead and sell my mid-life crisis, just so I can get something more manageable, more established.  It’s time to really grow up now and accept my adult responsibility.”

Wild Bear: “screw you mid-life crisis! I’m gonna drive a Rogue and stay up Until 1 am drinking Mt. Dew until the day I die! REBELS FOREVER!”

Those “big kids” were only some kind of mythical creature when we were younger, but today was one of those days that proved they exist.  A day where fart noises and “That’s what she said” jokes weren’t appropriate.  Today was an episode of the Congressional Hearings on Offshore Tax Practices live on C-SPAN when you really just wanted to get wasted on Tosh.0 for nine hours.  Yes, today was that kind of a day. 

Where did all of the fun go?  The Friday night sleepovers, the Jell-O eating contests, the whoopee cushion jokes, the fort-making contests in our basements? All of that is showing up less and less the older we all get.  Rather than enjoy the sun on our faces and go set up our homemade sprinkler systems, which would then invoke a water balloon war with our neighbors, we just stare out the window of a government-owned cubicle and calculate the percentage of students that would fall in an underprivileged demographic.

The scary part is that days like these are starting to appear more and more with every passing year.  They’re starting to completely overtake our entire conscious thought process.  With every passing cake day, there will be a fewer percentage of days per year that are spent watching marathons of “Space Jam”, or playing Call of Duty for 13 hours.  Instead, we’ll just find excitement by DVR-ing “60 Minutes” and adding a cover sheet to our TPS reports. 

Are days like these what we are all hoping to attain in life?  Are they our end goal? Our supreme feat? Our final, grown-up, crowning achievement? Because it seems the older we all get, the faster maturity is forced upon us; and sadly, there is nothing we can do about it except stand there like adults and just take our force-fed colonoscopies.  

I think I'm a big kid now.  And that scares the crap out of me.  

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