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In your youth, when the world was your oyster and you didn’t know about bills, work, or constant lower back pain, older adults and their behavior were the butt of at least 1/3 of your jokes. The other 2/3 were mainly just farts and curse words. One constant about joking about “old” people was your insistence that you would never, ever, under any circumstances, become old like them. This life mantra likely followed you to college, where some of it started to deteriorate, but for the most part you were too busy being an intoxicated degenerate to fully immerse yourself into any sort of adult behaviors. If you could manage to attend 60 percent of your classes and scrape a 2.2 you could easily rationalize yourself as a grown man.
However, once you’ve escaped the haze of your 4-6 year stay and immersed yourself into a semblance of adulthood, slowly but surely, like your parents, and their parents before you, adult behaviors and tendencies will begin to slowly grasp your soul. While it’s rare that someone graduates and goes from Bluto to Phil Dunphy, eventually you’ll inhabit a majority of the same behaviors of every single adult you’ve ever met. I’m not sure what causes it, maybe some twisted form of adult puberty, but a few of these tendencies may have already creeped their way into your life.
Complaining About Speeders
“HEY SLOW DOWN ASSHOLE” said every single adult in your neighborhood within three months of you and all of your friends getting your license. “You’re going too fast, son,” “Please slow down,” and “Ma’am, your son was going 75mph in a school zone, we are impounding his car and releasing him to you” were some of the irrational things you heard adults tell you about your driving. Those old stiffs who don’t know to drive and clog up the highway really annoyed the shit out of you back in the day. The speed limit in your neighborhood was at least 15mph too slow and you were too good of a driver to make a mistake anyways, those old people don’t know shit.
It’s now ten years later and you’ve just witnessed some dickhead teenager tear around a corner and you’re furious. Does that dumbass not realize he’s driving a big metal death missile? And that kids play in the street in this neighborhood? And that it only takes one mistake to cause a catastrOH MY GOD I’M OLD!
Enjoying Yardwork
One of the strangest things I saw in my youth occurred on Christmas Day. My grandparents were in town, and after we did all of our normal Christmas morning stuff, they proceeded to go outside and do yardwork at my parents’ place all day, and they loved it. Now, I understand that there’s only so much time as a senior citizen that you can spend around your obnoxious teenage grandchildren before you want to tear up your Last Will and Testament and leave everything to charity, but doing yardwork for pleasure? Holy shit, at that point in my life I think I would’ve rather stared at the wall, at least there’s AC, and I may have been able to see the TV.
By the time you get your own place with a yard the size of a ping pong table, you may sense yourself starting to change. You stare at your freshly mowed grass as fondly as you did your first pube, and a weekend trip to Home Depot for a plant and some Scotts sounds like a great damn time. Eventually you buy some gardening tools, start recording HGTV, and at one point will tell someone you have “a green thumb”. Old balls.
Waking Up/Going to Bed Early
We all had those couple friends in college who woke up at 6 a.m., made coffee, and started their day. These same weird assholes went to bed at 8:30 p.m. any night that they weren’t out until 4 a.m. sullying their liver. The rest of us normal people could sleep until 2 p.m. on any giving day, something that we’d been perfecting since our early-teenage years. As for going to bed early, well, you didn’t spend your entire childhood pushing your parents to extend your bedtime just to call it quits willingly when there’s so much to do at night.
Unlike the previous two, which just creep up on your geriatric ass out of nowhere, this one is forced on you. Between your body just breaking down like rusted out ’80s Ford Taurus and your boss not being cool with you rolling in 15 minutes late smelling like shit and rocking clearly unwashed hair, eventually you’ll conform to a reasonable sleep schedule. Even on the weekends you’ll find sleeping in is 8:30 at the latest. What makes you really feel old is that you actually enjoy it. You can get a lot more done when you start your day at the ass crack of dawn instead lying around until it’s too late to order lunch at Chili’s. Plus, breakfast is actually a pretty sweet meal.
These behaviors will continue to plague you, and only increase, from complaining about your loud neighbors, to watching The Weather Channel. The penultimate moment will come around 30, when, despite your wife’s wishes, you put out a flaming back of dog feces with your boots, and upon sniffing the remains in disgust, you will call the shit poop. But, there’s a reason that you’ll start to behave this way. Your growth and life experience actually start to sink in, and you come to the realization that “Oh, this is how you’re actually supposed to act.”.
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Kyle Bandujo
The artist formerly known as Crash Davis. My kid doesn't think I'm funny.
@kylebandujo
@bandujokyle
kyle.bandit
I was called sir by a skateboarding hoodlem the other day.
Brian is a grown man
Antiquing taking on a whole new meaning.
Will never enjoy yard work. Agree with everything else. It’s a horrible development.
Wife and a house with an actual stoop at 30… haha… right.