I'm at this weird phase in my life where I don't understand anything. Not necessarily in the academic (although admittedly I have been having doubts about what I'm doing at Truman for about four years now), but in the general life sense. Like, I can't understand why I bother to go to my class when I know the kid with the really long beard is going talk for 15 minutes (unprompted!) about Homestuck again. I can't understand why the Kirksville weather is trying to tease me into believing its spring like we don't still have over half a semester left. I can't understand why, during our last phone call, my grandma asked me four separate times with increasing intensity if I was okay when, to my knowledge, nothing was wrong. Does she know something I don't? Am I in some kind of imminent danger? Am I okay?
The thing that's currently confounding me most right now, though, is why my brother will only contact me via the chat feature on Snapchat. He's 16, so I suppose it makes a bit more sense than if he was like 35 or something, but still. He has my number. He even has my email. And yet, whenever he needs something from me, he chooses Snapchat. But like, not even the actual picture-taking part.
When I asked my friends about this, they all agreed it must be because he is ashamed to be speaking to me at all and therefore wants no proof of ever having contacted me. If that's the case, it's fair. I can't even be mad; I get it. Sixteen is weird. Plus, I feel like being 16 today is probably weirder than it was five years ago.
Like, are you even allowed to like stuff? Or do you have to be supremely unattached in order to be considered cool? Do you not want people to know you have family members because it's lame? Does everyone at school just pretend to be orphans like it's the best possible thing to be?
To be fair, I hardly remember being 16 (to be fairer, I can hardly remember yesterday). But I'm pretty sure no one thought it was cool to be an anonymous drifter with impeccable and expensive taste in clothes. Well, maybe they did. Now that I think about it, I probably have no clue about how a majority of my generation remembers being 16. All I remember was (finally) getting my braces off and my driver's licence within the same month and still being a total loser. Maybe I should have just pretended to be an orphan?
What would make a lot more sense about this behavior, though, is that my brother is a cool kid. He's taller than me, has a bag of whey protein next to his Keurig on his bedside table, and only ever seems to mumble in his absurdly deep voice. I don't even think he has acne (which is absolutely not fair, by the way, that's some garbage, Mom and Dad).
I think that's why I'm giving him a pass with the exclusive Snapchat communication. Even though he is objectively doing a much better job at high school than I ever did, he's definitely got his own shit to deal with. While I worried about making it to my own activities with carpooling my three younger siblings around, maybe he has to worry about managing three trillion social media accounts and looking equal levels of cool on all of them. I can barely handle seeming mentally coherent on the three (?) that I have.
So, whatever. Sixteen is tough and weird. The very least I can do is try to remember what half-assed conversation my brother and I had even though the text disappeared 45 minutes ago.
