Remember when you were a kid, a teen, still living at home, and your parents were always all up in your shit over one thing or another, and you couldn't wait to grow up and get your own place? Remember fantasizing about being able to stay up as late as you wanted, watch whatever tv you wanted, eat whatever you wanted (mac and cheese every day if you so chose!), playing your stereo as loud as you wished, at whatever hour, with no one to tell you to "turn that crap off", or "clean your room", or "be home by eleven", or "no, you can't go out with your friends on a school night"?
And then you got your own apartment, for which you had to pay, which meant having a job, which meant you could not, in fact, stay up as late as you wanted. Worse, the steady diet of frozen pizza and Lucky Charms and Kraft mac-n-cheese made you gain twenty pounds and break out with monster zits, so you ended up eating salads and vegetables and stuff...by choice. And people still screamed for music to be turned down, only now it was you, screaming at your neighbors (it's three in the morning for Christsakes!) and calling the police when they ignore you. You learned--although you believed it impossible--there's a level of filth that even you can't tolerate; which meant, much to your chagrin, you had to do the dishes and wash your clothes and scrub the toilet once in awhile. Often on weekends...in addition to paying the bills, and taking the car in for servicing, and going to stupid dinner parties with your partner's boring friends, and shopping for groceries, or a birthday present for your niece, who's thirteen, and just wants to get the fuck out of your sister's house and get a place of her own.
So you buy her a really inappropriate gift; a revealing outfit, gangster rap, beer. Something that'll make her parents go totally batshit. And you take her to a midnight screening of an equally inappropriate movie, and let her wear her micro-mini and drink a beer with her popcorn. Take a drag off your cigarette. Because you realize it's the closest she's ever gonna get to living the fantasy of adulthood she's created; and she'll learn the hard truth soon enough.
Posted by Antigeist at December 13, 2005 01:49 PM