The other day I was trying to figure out a way to hang up a hand towel in my bathroom. My apartment doesn't have the fancy nickel hardware a typical house would so my first thought was...Command strips! What a nifty invention I only ever came face to face with in college. You think of the house you grew up in where everything is nailed to the walls or on permanent hardware. But no, university accredited apartments don't invest in these basics. How, shall I call it, crafty of the Command brand to make a plastic hook and double-sided tape a seven dollar must-have. For some reason, I see the trivial Command strip as the perfect symbol of a person stuck between the teenage and adult world. We're unable to really settle down and in budgeting senses, are pretty cheap. For anywhere from two to four years our plans, place of living, bank statements, and sense of being are temporary. We're susceptible to change and nowhere near ready to lock into anything permanent whether it be relationships, jobs, or the city we want to live in. In the most simple, school supply metaphor out there, we're all like a two-sided piece of semi-sturdy tape that sticks to just about anything that seems right. So on that note, let's be a little more realistic now.
While standing at the top of the stairs of teen life with about eight flights of adulthood to start on, we're in quite a hazy place full of confusion and mishaps. And there's a couple phases that we all encounter.
1. The Party Phase
Though controversial, this is the most important phase to go through and, for our liver's sake, hopefully phase out of. That teenage rebellion simmers in college girls' hearts and the crazy spirits come out on what used to be school nights with a 9 o'clock curfew. There's really no telling how long this lasts or if it ever truly ceases but eventually raging partiers cool off and transition into the social drinker category our parents fall under.
2. The Failure/Questioning Phase
Amidst late nights, boring classes, and people you know that are older than you accomplishing cool adult things, we all succumb to a dark place convincing us that we peaked in high school (junior high in scarier circumstances) and that our purpose is wrong, our major is pointless, and doing anything other than being your parents' favorite child seems impossible. We can't win, we can't even stretch our minds far enough to come up with a fun outfit to wear to functions. Grey's Anatomy ended sad, we miss our dogs, we're too far from home, and there's too much laundry to carry downstairs then back upstairs. Everything seems bad and hard and tiring. And yes, this happens once a week or more.
3. The Over Productive Phase
You know that first week of any semester when you're all in order and your hopeful goals are still intact? That's this phase- when we do everything and we're the ultimate doer. School, work, involvement, the idol volunteer, a good child that calls home. This is the mode when you can tell the kid what the last slide said instead of saying "Sorry I'm not paying any attention (*Netflix, *Twitter, *Pinterest, *Tasty videos)". You actually forget to eat because you've kept so busy and don't watch 3 episodes of your show per day. It's amazingly helpful to be in this phase, but often short lived because who has time to be on the go all the time?
4. The 'We'll Figure it Out' Phase
No matter what travesty has just occurred or how jumbled up our lives seem to get, everything always works out and we either go on the whim or figure out a different way to make it work. It never is as dramatic as we can make it feel. In reality most of the time we get so stressed or concerned because we do want something for ourselves, we just don't quite know how to make it happen. Day by day an sometime minute to minute, things fall into place and we really do figure it out eventually, well for now.
