'Tween Hither and Yon

What is the appeal of being a teenager?

This is a rant, I'm not going to bother to organize it.

Since my 18th birthday (November 10, 2017) I still have the word teen, as part of my age designation, but I am officially past the stereotypical age window known as a teenager. Somehow, I never really felt like I was one.

All my life, I've heard tales of the supposedly unexplainable and terrific beast that is a teenager. My 13th birthday was an upsetting experience for me, because it had me believing that I would by some dark magic no longer get along with my parents, forget all my morals, and somehow attain to heaps more of unsavory concepts. That day we went to the zoo, and I believe we were in the car on the way there when the clock ticked over past the exact minute of my birth (11:14 a.m.). Nothing much changed. My parents and I continued our typical in-car activities: various conversation, the occasional word game, and our much beloved singing together.

The rest of the day, I know was pleasant, but doesn't remain particularly memorable to this day.

Throughout my time in junior high and high school, I was myself called a teenager, yet I never came to understand the mentality I was supposedly supposed to have.

My elementary school was a bubble compared to junior high. From sometime in third grade, I knew of the existence of swear words, but I didn't actually know what any of them were until I got to seventh grade. The school dress code didn't even allow spaghetti straps. I knew that babies grew inside their mother for nine months before being born, but I had no idea how they got there.

Approximately three months before my twelfth birthday, I started seventh grade. There I was submerged in the culture of adolescence. The world where edgy is supposed to equal cool. I wanted to cry every time I heard a swear word, and that wasn't good, because suddenly I was hearing them multiple times a day. The teachers were suddenly no longer harshly scolding kids every time they uttered a forbidden word, and as a result, they flowed free.

It was also the cool thing for students to be talking about sex. At that age, I assume (and dearly hope) that the majority of my classmates didn't actually have any personal experience, but that sure didn't stop a lot of people from talking like they did. I'm guessing it probably wasn't until then that I learned the name of the male part, and that the opening to the female reproductive tract actually existed, and that "vagina" wasn't a word that my neighbor had made up when I was six and she was three. Seriously, I hadn't heard that word anywhere other than from her before.

The worst part of that for me, was that I actually started thinking about sex a lot - from a scientific standpoint. I had still never heard of an erection, so even when I now knew that babies were produced when the male part was inserted in the female one, I couldn't even figure out how that was physically possible.

The dress code was another issue. The junior high still had one but it was significantly less strict. Boys clothing didn't change all that much, but the girls sure did. Many girls seemed to think that as little clothing as possible was the way to go. Shorts got shorter than I knew existed, and for quite a while, seeing another girl's cleavage could bring me to tears. Six years later, I'm still uncomfortable with it.

In elementary school, it was entirely shocking to hear that the janitor had found an empty bottle of alcohol in one of the bathrooms. Starting in junior high, and only getting worse in high school, more and more classmates of mine were drinking, and even smoking marijuana.

All of this stuff was supposed to be the coolest, but none of that lifestyle was ever the least bit attractive to me. Most of it was outright repulsive. Those parts that didn't elicit disgust in me were just a giant "why?"

I must make a brief mention to the ripped jeans fad. I once heard a classmate say: "My mom said, 'I don't get it. Why do you want to buy jeans with holes in them already?' I told her, 'you don't get it, it's the fashion.'" Even while listening to her I thought, 'I agree with your mother, Alexis. Why do you want to buy jeans with holes in them already?'