• Adulthood

Adulthood is basically childhood without parental supervision. While that sounds cool because it seems that you can do whatever you want, whatever you were not allowed to do when you were a kid, it’s really not very cool at all. Sure, now I can watch the Simpsons, use swear words, be friends with people who are a bad influence, smoke, listen to my music loudly–all things that I was not allowed to do when I was a kid (but probably did anyway). But without parental supervision, adults are basically a bunch of irresponsible brats…without parental supervision.

Since I am supposedly an adult, I can eat all the cookies and ice cream I damn well want to whenever the hell I want to. That’s right, even for breakfast. And I have done that before, because there is no one to stop me. I have woken up hungry and without moving from my bed scarfed an enormous cup of vanilla ice cream in its entirety before doing anything else. Awesome, right? Wrong. If my mom had been here to yell at me about eating “good food” before “junk food” and the importance of a good breakfast, I might not have wound up writhing in bed with the heinously painful, nauseating, rumbling stomachache that followed shortly afterward.

I can also stay up as late as I want, which also sounds cool, but also isn’t.

Because I have a job.

So it will be evening and the boyfriend and I will be sitting quietly, perhaps I will be surfing the net and he will be reading a book, or vice versa. Then I will notice that he looks a little too comfortable. So I’ll shove him a little. He will ignore me, so I shove him again, harder this time. He continues to ignore me. I give him a final shove that almost makes him topple onto the floor and so he pins my arms behind my back and tickles my sides until I scream and finally breathlessly apologize, not because I am sorry, but because I want him to stop torturing me. Then when he finally stops, I use the pause to grab his throat and stick my fingers in his ears. Soon we are chasing each other around the room and swiping at each other, shrieking and retaliating, and before a winner of this war can be declared, my head explodes with sudden pain, and the boyfriend grabs his own face as we collide idiotically into one another. Game over. We nurse our injuries and glare at each other while giggling hysterically at our incomparably juvenile clumsiness.

Then we realize it’s 2:00 a.m. I have to be up for work in four hours.

If my parents were there, they would yell at me for making so much noise so late at night and tell me that I have to go to sleep because I have to wake up early in the morning.

If there were more moms yelling at their damn adult offspring for their nonsensical actions, bad behavior and all around fuck-ups, a lot of things would probably be different, in a good way.

That douchebag at work would probably be much less of a douchebag if his mom was yelling at him to play nice with the other colleagues. If that were the case, then his supervisor could write a note to her and tell her that her son is spending too much time staring at pictures of girls on Facebook when he should be working hard so that he can actually earn that salary he makes every month. Otherwise, he could be in danger of getting fired (that’s like expelled, but it goes more with the analogy, you see).

If the idiots on the road had any kind of parental supervision, they would probably drive more carefully, if not out of decency or for the sake of safety, then out of fear that their parents might take their driving privileges away.

Parental supervision might water down some evil dictators, too. I bet Omar El Bashir’s parents would not be too happy if they knew that he was caught committing genocide again. A crisis as complicated as that in Darfur could be solved by a little deprivation of Internet, TV and video games and a few stinging whacks on the ass.

But no. People pretty much stop listening to their parents when they figure out they are not afraid of them anymore. And if that doesn’t happen, then they stop being told what to do when they think they have reached “adulthood” and are capable of making their own decisions.

Most people are not actually capable of making their own decisions. Most people are rambling morons. They really just need their parents to yell at them and tell them what to do, and even if they don’t like it, be threatened into doing as they say with a good, resonating whack on the ass.

*Photo from My Job Chart.