It has occurred to me that I was not a very cool teenager. I say 'was', despite being not even nearly out of the woods yet, because I feel that turning 18 is officially the end of teenagedom, mainly because it implies that you are now legally allowed to do all the things that were so exciting in the throws of fifteen-year-old passion. At 18, you are allowed by society to be an Official and Certified Fuck-Up and to ruin your life however you so choose, but before then you are still a child of the community, or, in my case, a child of suburbia born to a family of nudists and eccentrics of varying severity. A childhood of pop culture infiltrating my brain has led me to believe that the years between discovering that one thing that boys are so keen for and being able to vote are meant to be tumultuous.
Maybe it was due to my two saintly years at a fancy girls grammar school, during which I knew no boys or parties or anything except the fact that once a month, the entire school would become a seething pit of hellcats, with Mother Nature laughing overhead. I had dysfunctional friends and we fought a lot and shared stories and walked everywhere in a mass of badly-proportioned limbs and cheap girlishness. But we never just did without thinking. Or at least I never did. Perhaps I might have if I had the chance but I didn't, so by the time I left the school and discovered the boys and the parties and the bad, bad things, I could only think, and never lose myself the way other teenagers seemed to. I could party, sure, but never completely throw caution to the wind and just trust that the fates would take care of me and my friends and the night. My dad talks about the God of Children and Idiots - a very busy deity who spent a lot of time saving my father in the seventies - but maybe I don't have enough faith.
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