Before I get to her though, I want to talk about me. And I want to declare loudly to the world that I am so thankful that the Internet didn't exist when I was 20 years old. Or texting. Or phones with cameras or video. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
When I went off to college, I wanted to be an adult. So, I started doing things that I was certain made me adult (and also things that I wasn't allowed to do at home). I embraced the F-Word like a long-lost friend and celebrated it's versatility. What other word could be used as a noun, verb, adverb, and adjective? It had to be the Best Word Ever, so I used it fluently and frequently. I also added all of the other "bad words" to my vocabulary to round it all out. In fact, I could speak almost entirely in curse words and not miss a beat. Why? Because I was now an Adult.
Here is a picture of me freshman year. Check out the lack of smile and overall snarky look. That is what cool looks like when you are 18 in the 80s. Or so I thought. And it also screams Adult, no?
One of my other favorite pastimes was drinking excessively. That is soooo Adult, isn't it? The fact that I was tiny and completely unable to handle my alcohol was irrelevant. It was a Coming of Age Thing that made me sophisticated and witty, right? Sadly no. It made me stupid. As I said, so glad that there were no phone cameras back in the 80s. Kids who shoot for adulthood by drinking and cursing are WannaBes. Real adults Know Better.
When I moved to New York City and got a job in publishing it was shock to discover that no one cursed like a sailor on the job. In fact, no one cursed at all. It sunk in pretty fast that Real Adults don't actually spout the F-words like a faucet left on full stream. In order to tame my own language at work, I had to curb it at home. Serious adjustment. Why? Because that is what Adults do.
Other lessons came harder. People who can't handle their drink (like me) still like to drink. Especially if they are living in the City That Never Sleeps. Turns out that if I wanted to be functional at work I needed to sleep during the week. Ah... but that left the weekends for me to show off how Adult I was. My friend and roommate had been doing this for one year longer than I and knew where the Good Clubs were. She even lent me her Club Clothes so that we could go out.
That looked a little bit like this:
I couldn't understand why we would go to these clubs and I would meet these guys who kept getting all Handsy with me. It was terrible. The other really bad part of this equation was that I didn't know how to handle it. I had zero ability to draw a boundary and was unwilling to hurt anyone's feelings by indicating that I wasn't interested. (This all dated back to my feelings of unworthiness from junior high and high school where people had no trouble hurting my feelings,) In the end, my friend would bail me out of the Bad Situation by assailing The Octopus with a stream of F-words and he would go away.
After several rounds of this, I understood the common denominator here was Me and The Clothes. I told my friend I would still go with her, but from this point on I was going casual. Jeans and a blouse worked for me. That did indeed solve the problem. I still met people... just not Handsy ones. Yeah, I had to act and look like an Adult in order to get treated like one.
I am going to assume that Miley Cyrus put on that performance at the VMAs because she wanted to show the world that she was no longer Hannah Montana, the Kid. She was an Adult now. All she proved was that she was Trying To Be An Adult. Shame on all of the people who are supposed to be helping her make the transition. Apparently none of them know what an actual Adult looks like either, or that train wreck wouldn't have happened. The Good News... even people who go through years of bad decision-making, like me, of WannaBe Adult behavior eventually figure out what Actual Adult Behavior looks like. There's still hope for you, Miley.
