I'm only one Team Jacob t-shirt and one Justin Beiber album away from middle school.
When I was thirteen, I essentially acted like an adult. I watched movies like Citizen Kane, read Dickens and Vonnegut, and listened almost exclusively to classical music, with some classic rock occasionally mixed in. At youth gatherings, I inevitably ended up in the corner talking to one of the adult leaders about Ibsen's feminism or something we had both read in the New York Times. I didn't fit in well with the kids my age, and I didn't know how to relate to their obsessions with make up, boy bands, and middle school drama.
Now I'm twenty two, it's almost as if I'm making up for my lost adolescence. Sure, I'm still a reasonably responsible individual, and I still probably wouldn't fit in well with a group of tweens (somehow I don't think they'd appreciate my fondness for words like "bucolic" and "effervescent" or want to discuss the pros and cons of legal positivism). At the same time, however, my tastes have become remarkably juvenile. From what I usually feel like watching (10 Things I Hate About You, Post Grad, Clueless) to what I usually feel like listening to (Glee, High School Musical, and Taylor Swift [sorry Britny!]), I ought to be fourteen years old. I prefer Seventeen to Cosmo and Forever 21 to Banana Republic (although the latter is purely because, if I have $30 to spend on clothes, I'd rather get eight t-shirts and a headband than one camisole, especially if it might be made by child labor either way). I worry about who I'm going to sit with at lunch, and I'm still mildly scandalized when I find out two of my classmates are sleeping together, even if they've been dating for months. This week, to celebrate the mid-term break, I checked two books out of the library: James Joyce's Dubliners (a collection of literary short stories) and Nancy Farmer's The Sea of Trolls (a young adult novel about an eleven year old who gets kidnapped by Vikings). Guess which one I loved, and which one I found boring and may never finish.
P.S. It turns out the secret to enjoying Notre Dame football games is to sit with one's friends, at least ten rows behind obnoxious sophomore boy and his sophomoric friends (who, more than halfway through the semester, still haven't managed to figure out that their assigned seats are not in the middle of the law student section).
