“Jesus, everybody I know is teething this spring. When did just nubbling on things with your wet gums stop being enough, you know?”
“There it is, right on time, just like clockwork. Everyone’s developing spatial awareness at the same time, like a bunch of fascists.”
“If I have to go to one more bar mitzvah, hand to God, I will set something on fire. Turn thirteen, have a bar mitzvah, start the eighth grade. It’s like zombie clockwork. Well, I’m opting out. I’m turning thirteen and then I’m going to become a fire monster.”
“I don’t really buy into the idea that we all need to achieve menarche and start menstruating regularly. Yeah, all my friends have gotten their periods, like a bunch of fucking sellouts. They used to be cool. What happened? When did everyone jump off the Period Cliff and why didn’t I get the Evite?”
“Pretty much everybody is either going to college or getting their first full-time jobs. Which is fine. Which is fine. I’m seriously not judging their choices. I just think it’s weird that I’m apparently the only one who’s repeating senior year indefinitely.”
“All of my friends, I swear to God — all of them — are all, like, getting their first yearly colonoscopies and I’m just over here, like, whaaaaatttt even is being an adult! I love weed!”
“No, I’m happy for her. I’m happy for her. I am. Do I think she rolled over her 401(k) a little soon? Yeah. Personally, I’m waiting until I know it’s the right time, not just because I’m scared it’s the only chance I’m going to have to get to do it…Oh my God, I didn’t say that. Pretend I didn’t say that.”
“You don’t have to go through menopause to be fulfilled, you know.”
“All my friends are enrolling in AARP and becoming grandparents, and it’s like, since when was the natural progression of life mandatory, right? You don’t have to turn 55 just because somebody tells you it’s what women your age are “supposed” to do. That’s like…that’s like against the rules of feminism.”
“Oh, that’s cute. Everyone’s dying, like, as a group, that’s so original. Everyone’s just so scared of change and being alone, it’s like they can’t even die originally. Why not just move to the suburbs, right?”
Tags: complaining, humor, obviously getting married and having children is more optional than menstruating you’re missing the point, opting out, the life cycle, there’s not actually a point i just thought it was funny
If you *had* kids, you would realize that this is only funny because we do. Had the nutcase mom at choir bullying my kid about the raised expectations created by my child actually succeeding at something this week. Last year, different nutcase was slagging on me because we don’t discuss every so-called “milestone” with the class…
Even if you win, you’re still a rat. Lily said it best.
“And I confess that as I beheld him and felt that there but for the grace of God went Bertram Wooster, a shudder ran through the frame. It all reminded me so vividly of the time I had addressed that girls’ school.
Of course, looking at it dispassionately, you may say that for horror and peril there is no comparison between an almost human audience like the one before me and a mob of small girls with pigtails down their backs, and this, I concede, is true. Nevertheless, the spectacle was enough to make me feel like a fellow watching a pal going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, and the thought of what I had escaped caused everything for a moment to go black and swim before my eyes.”
As far as I’m concerned, “getting Wodehoused” is now the most shameful thing that can happen to you on the interwebs.
As a parent, I formally endorse the Wodehousing of anyone who invokes their parenthood. Keeps us honest. Please, someone Wodehouse me this exact second, I’m not even joking.
(i am saying this as Tyler Durden and will be horrified when I experience it as Ed Norton’s…character?)
Nothing quite like seeing a commentor being snarked at by the editor, to make you feel really good about losing interest in reading The Toast articles.
Not cool. Your comment contributes nothing. I do hope you feel better soon, though. I mean that sincerely.
Oh, and I guess the Wodehousing was a kind and valuable contribution? I don’t really want to be “cool”.
Your comment is bad and you should feel bad.
Like, I get it, I get it. Donny got a boner in 5th period math class. Good for him. I’m sure I’ll get a boner in math class someday, too, when I’m ready. But I’m not gonna post photos of it every day on Facebook. A photo or two? Sure. But not every day, and certainly as hell not my Cover Photo. And what’s worse is all those BonerBloggers he’s friends with like every photo he posts. They’re just encouraging him! Gah, what a circle jerk.
heh. “BonerBlogger”
For the record, I would definitely read a boner blog.
“Is Your Underwear Permanently Stunting Your Boner’s Growth?”
“Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff!: How Sweatpants Can Help You Feel Closer to Your Boner”
“How to Talk about Your Boner with Friends Who Don’t Have Boners”
I love you so much
I love you like a brother.
I started making small fearful keening noises right around “But I’m not gonna post photos of it every day on Facebook” and now I can’t stop 🙁 🙁 🙁
I FINALLY GOT TO USE “MENARCHE” IN A POST
ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED
For extra credit, try to use ‘menses’ in a sentence, e.g., I finally have my menses, I hope not sporadically.
I may or may not have actually complained about the period-getters like this when I was 13. Being a late bloomer + the preteen need to be like everyone else is pretty rough.
As a ballet dancer, I was bummed when my period showed up at almost-14. That was one area of my adolescent life where I didn’t need to fit in, and yet another reason to side-eye Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret.
Yeah, I wasn’t feeling it and must’ve been surrounded by outliers because I was so upset and ALONE at age 11 getting my ladytimes.. THE WORST. I was really upset about it. Also because, you know, people are terrible at teaching adolescent tomboys about this shit. I was so mortified when the girls in my class figured out I was trying to find a maxipad on a field trip. GUH.
ME TOO. I lied about it and hid it from my friends for like three years after age 11 because I was so embarrassed about what I thought was early blooming.
I DID TOO! Like point blank lied whenever anyone asked. I only actually confessed this to my highschool best friend recently..and I’m 26.
I had a dance teacher who thought something was wrong with me because I seemed “so developed” at “such a young age.” I.e., that I started having a period and such at 13, rather than 17 or 18 like she did. She seriously thought that was the normal age.
Oh my god by 8th grade ALL OF MY FRIENDS had their periods and I didn’t, and then I read Middlesex and became convinced that I was never going to get one because clearly I was intersex. I was practically delirious with relief when it finally started.
I was also delirious with relief (summer before my freshman year of highschool, at the ripe age of 14 – practically retirement age!) This relief was soon replaced with discomfort, and I had a physically and emotionally absent mother who only had tampons around the house. Tampons are difficult for a 14 year old, and I didn’t realize how FAR they had to be inserted until a few months into womanhood.
Got the applicator stuck the first time I tried a tampon, and I quite literally screamed for my mother (who, yes, came and helped me out). I still hate those things, even though I use the non-applicator types under duress.
Pads all the way.
I was actively mad at my best friend when she got her period before I did. If only I had known…
I have contemplated writing a script to purchase baby blankets for registries at Babies’R’Us, but the window after the weddings is just too randomized, almost as though people are making those decisions in their own sweet time. Jerks!
Oh, but it would be so exquisitely passive-aggressive to automatically send out a baby blanket a year after marriage or whatever. It’s like something my great-aunt would do, if she knew how to code.
“Oh no darling, it’s not a hint, it’s just that MOST people have a baby on the way by now. Pay it no mind.”
(When my mother announced her wedding, my great-aunt offered her “just a whole bunch of cloth diapers I have left from your cousin.” When my mother explained that she wasn’t pregnant “Oh, just take them all anyway. They’re great for cleaning windows, and then next year, you can use the rest as diapers!” My mother waited eleven years before having her first child, probably only partly out of spite.)
This is my inevitable future and I am delighted by it. And I am wholly delighted by this story as well.
The only balm that soothes my fear of mortality is knowing that by the time my generation starts to bite it en masse, the previous generation will be too dead to judge us for how we do it. Who am I kidding, though, there’ll be a ‘STFU Widows’ blog by the time I’m 65.
this is the most reassuring thing I’ve read since my younger sibs started asking me for advice on Final Fantasy Seven.
Man, I wish I had the option of “fire monster” instead of “bat mitzvah.”
Man, if I could’ve become a fire monster at the age of 12, I would have absolutely done it
I wish I had the option of fire monster for almost every major life event. Definitely for periods.
yeah. there was a real mitzvah season. i remember thinking “another one?! okay, friends!”
yeah, for certain people, that one is actually not all that exaggerated
Plus, this one is actually tied to a very specific age and your peer group is all within a year of each other, age-wise at that point in your life. It’s a recipe for far more intense event-stacking than the weddings (albeit with less travel due to post-college diaspora).
I started at a new school during the bat mitzvah year. So many parties to go to, so few people I knew.
You know, just because my parents got old, and their parents got old and died, and their parents got old and died, it doesn’t mean that’s what I want for me, you know? I’m proud of my dead heritage, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a self-hating ethnic corpse. I just think the right direction for me is living forever and staying young, and I want you to respect that, Mom.
I actually think this is the boomer perspective.
“Look, I’M not going to get old, because I’m special, and I mean, maybe I’m a little bit old and don’t have enough for retirement, but I DESERVE a trip to India this year, you know? Thank god for Social Security! Lalala lalala lalala don’t worry, I’ll ask my 94 year old mother for money, she’s got some, I’m sure of it, she always has.”
This was my thought, too. “Huh, that one about aging is a leeeeeeetle too close to reality, eh?”
I’d like to never hear again any variation on “whaaaaattt even is being an adult??!? Like, right?” because I’m sick to the teeth of it. TO THE TEETH I SAY.
Also I enjoy gratuitously rolling my eyes at anyone who uses the word “sellout” in an unironic fashion.
Right now I’m working on a mid-year resolution to stop plastering social media with self-deprecating crap every time I have a twinge of self-doubt. Because tweeting “LOLLL I had a tortilla with peanut butter on it for dinner like an ADULT” is just as terrible as all the people who are bragging about their organic culinary achievements all over instagram. Also, there’s nothing wrong with a tortilla with peanut butter on it.
That is an excellent resolution! Well done. And you are correct: nothing wrong with it and no need for self-deprecation!
A tortilla with peanut butter is a great thing. I have been known to totally sincerely wax poetic about the freedom of being responsible for feeding yourself and no one else. You can try weird cooking experiments, or just stick whatever’s around into your mouth, or decide you are more lazy than hungry and go to sleep. It is a life phase I will savor however long it may last.
Do you ever wrap a banana in it? Peanut butter banana tortillas rule.
I had a tortilla with peanut butter on it for lunch, and I was completely un-ironically pleased by that. So.
Sure. Just keep rubbing it in about those teeth. I’ll be nubbling over here in the corner…
“It’s just like EVERYONE is dividing into an actual human being, and I feel really pushed into it! What if I want to remain an egg forever?”
Gastrulation is for sellouts.
This makes my human development student’s heart very happy.
“So, *supposedly* Suzie is reading at, like, a fourth grade level and we’re only in second grade, but that’s only because she has an older brother. You know, scaffolding and all that shit.”
“Ok, so I know that “everyone” is attaching to their parents right now, but I just think that at six weeks, I’m not ready for that level of commitment yet.”
Ok but that is actually how I felt about Bar Mitzvah’s when I was in 8th grade.
Man, I never got to go to a single bar mitzvah and they seem like they were awesome.
I’ve only been to one, and I’ve been chasing the dragon of a party that great ever since.
I may be the only kid on earth who felt left out for not having one, but everyone got awesome parties and like $6k “for the future” and inflatable saxophones.
That’s for real. Where my little cousins went to school in a super Jewish part of New York, some of the goyish kids just threw huge ass 13th birthday parties to keep up. My little cousin also served shrimp at her bat mitzvah, so, you know, how seriously are they really taking it.
I was once told at a Jewish wedding “seafood is ok but NEVER PORK” and she was VERY upset that there were pork buns at this wedding, and no one else gave a shit.
My godfather is Jewish from Montreal, and my godmother is Texan, and they def serve ham at their Hanukkah parties.
I mean, a book called “Everything Tastes Better With Bacon” was given at my family’s Hannukah party so clearly we are not taking it very seriously, but we also weren’t bat mitzvah’d. I feel like it’s a bigger, more personal commitment than just observing the holidays.
My sister had her bat mitzvah reception at a Chinese restaurant that we basically said “eh, no pork I guess” to satisfy the one group of cousins that kept Kosher. But she was the youngest so we were all pretty lassez-faire about it by then.
Why were there always inflatable saxophones??
Seconding this question. I went to two bat mitzvahs and do not recall any inflatable musical instruments of any type and I am DISAPPOINTED.
I actually meant that every bar and bat mitzvah I went to did in fact have inflatable saxophones – which I definitely appreciated, I just have never had any idea why.
Oh fuck, imagine the wedding season of your life but at 13. It’s like that. It was kind of awesome. I didn’t personally get one, and it hurt, I tell you.
My eighth grade class had 50 kids in it and 10 of them were Jewish (11, if you count me, but we were about as secular as you could get) and for some reason, a large percentage of those 10 kids had fall birthdays and everyone else got so jealous of the giant parties where you’d rent out a nightclub and fill it with inflatable musical instruments and customized t-shirts that all the non-Jews just started having huge copycat 13th birthday parties. Which were just as fun and you didn’t even have to sit through the temple part first!
We later moved to a place where we WERE the Jewish population and a new friend and I decided to look in each other’s closets to find a homecoming dress and she was baffled by my wide array of formalwear.
I hear you. It was like not having a Saturday for a full year. You couldn’t do ANYTHING.
Oh god, bar/bat mitzvahs. I went to a Jewish school, and the entire 8th grade year was like…every single weekend held one if not two of these parties, sometimes same day, sometimes even three of them. Most people at school invited EVERYONE, which sucked, because I was NOT popular and so I’d just hang out mostly by myself trying not to look too awkward. I also didn’t have the confidence to wear the same formal dress over and over again, so I not only had to attend horrible isolating parties that I couldn’t leave for hours for social reasons and also lack of my own car, I also had to argue my sensible and thrifty mother into buying me a WIDE VARIETY of formal dresses. AND you can’t actually drink because you’re 12/13, so… What I’m saying is that I would have gone for “fire monster” in a heartbeat.
I see you have been listening to my phone conversations with my sister over my last childless friend being pregnant with twins. I’m not going to stop, but now my bitching will have more fire monster references.
Look, I understand how a face full if zits and crippling self doubt can be the crucible in which your self esteem is forged, but do I need that journey to self love? Does anyone?
“Well, I’m opting out. I’m turning thirteen and then I’m going to become a fire monster.” – if this isn’t itself a normal stage in the life cycle then I want nothing more to do with other people TBQH
“Bitch, I got mine.”
“Your what?”
*rolls eyes, whispers* “My period.”
That was me, actually. More or less.
Losing your first set of teeth is totally overrated. Everyone who’s anyone is growing two sets like badass sharks.
Four of my permanent teeth grew behind my baby teeth, and I now realize that I could’ve been a badass shark girl if my dentist hadn’t insisted on pulling them out. DAMNIT.
I remain unrepentant about using the sentence “I lost another friend to marriage” MULTIPLE times.
Are there people who actually respond this forcefully to people they know having kids / marrying? Tho I imagine a generally strange / terrible person might qualify getting married as “selling out”. Then again I guess I know some very strident gay ppl who may very well take such a tack. And Rust Cohle would feel that way about birthing, but only because of his own fucked up guilt, so
No, I made up an entire subculture for the purpose of skewering them here.
Yes. But we generally don’t say it to their faces. (Only under duress.)
Yes. But we generally don't say it to their faces. (Only under duress.)
Yeeep, I have friends who say these things. I've also had people make very similar comments about people getting into serious relationships while in their twenties (I am in my twenties, in a serious relationship, and they say these things to my face). I've also heard this said about having kids, although in my experience that's usually behind the persons back. So, they definitely do exist.
Oh, man. If ONLY menarche were something that could be opted out of! I’d have been the first name on the list. *wistful sigh*
Ok, everyone, I get it, walking is such a freakin’ amazing experience<i> and you just feel so damn empowered now that you can balance yourself on two feet, and all of us crawlers just have no effing idea what we’re missing. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go wear out my knees some more on the living room carpet. Hey, maybe I’ll get rug burn again!
Ok, everyone, I get it, walking is such a freakin' amazing experience<\i> and you just feel so damn empowered now that you can balance yourself on two feet, and all of us crawlers just have no effing idea what we're missing. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go wear out my knees some more on the living room carpet. Hey, maybe I'll get rug burn again!