So I'm feeling old and dried up like a prune. Partly it's my own fault for spending time at the pool, the summer nesting spot of teenagers looking nubile and a little bit pimply.
During the course of the rest of the year, I barely come in contact with teens: I have no idea what they do or where they live September to May. I guess they spend a lot of time at Abercrombie & Fitch or at the movie theater, either watching vampire flicks (girls) or action-thriller-fart films (boys). I''m assuming they also go to school and have part-time jobs in shops I can never afford to shop at.
Obviously I was a teenager at one time, in a proterozoic period in a distant galaxy, before the invention of cell phones. Talking of which, according to a recent study, if I want to be more like a teen, I shouldn't be using my phone for voice calls; instead, I should be pounding the teensy keys like a texting automaton, preferably blindfolded.
In an effort to avoid the onslaught of middle age, I've identified several changes I can make to my life to give me the appearance of being young and vibrant:
1. Drink Arnold Palmer Half and Half Iced Tea: don't mistake this for a lesser Red Bull - this 23 oz of iced tea/lemonade is like an elixir of youth, or at least I think so. Teen girls in the know knock this back like it's crack cocaine.
2. Slather up with Proactiv: yup, if I use products for spotty teenage skin, I can transform my increasingly creased dermis into skin like a spotty teenager. Again, fountain of youth stuff, right?
3. Refuse to watch anything on television. Screw the cinema-screen-surround-sound-home-theater experience, that's for oldsters. From now on, I'm only gonna watch viral videos on my blinged-out cellie.
4. Talk in Lady Gaga lyrics. I swear, I recently overheard a young buck at the snack bar chatting to the lady behind the counter using only Ke$ha and Lady Gaga songs. I am not joking about this. Snack bar chick replied in monosyllables, so I couldn't be sure if she was quoting Timbaland or just stupid.
5. stop using punctuation and capital letters thats just for people born before the internet and im all about social networking so there
6. Supersize my Facebook friends list. See 5 above for fuller explanation. It's actually better to know more people through Facebook than to actually, well, know those people in real life.
7. Wear Silly Bandz in an ironic way.
8. Buy a twin bed and pretend I live at home with my parents. I'll even make my husband pretend he's my boyfriend and have him sneak in the house to share my bed. He'll have to leave early in the morning before my "parents" catch him. As a trainee teenager, I know that I'll have to adjust my definition of "early morning" to mean around 10 AM.
That's my shortlist for now. If all goes well, I'll be starting twelfth grade in a week or two and I'll find out what teens do in the winter months.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Monday, August 2, 2010
The Drive from Planet OBX
Each summer, I've felt inadequate when people ask what we're doing and it doesn't involve the Outer Banks. For some reason, around the nation's capital, there are two socially acceptable places to go to the beach: the Cape and North Carolina.
I'll state for the record that people who vacay on the Cape, don't mean the one in South Africa; instead, they're referring to the area around Cape Cod, including Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket and another less fancy island that I forget the name of for now. A stint on the Cape involves a lot of money (usually old, but new hedge fund wealth is accepted in these recessionary times), extended family named "Preston" and "Buffy" and madras pants, none of which I'm in possession of.
Anyway, moving down the social scale a few notches, the Outer Banks is the other check box on the beach-bound survey of summer. This summer, the family and I packed a bathing suit and an iPod and headed south of the border to the Outer Banks.
To be fair, North Carolina is perfectly nice. There's nothing dreadful about it - beaches are sandy, skies are generally blue, rental houses are decorated in lighthouse and shell motifs . . . it's the journey that's the problem. Starting at the Virginia/North Carolina border, traffic trickled like molasses to its destination. It took several hours to reach the bridge optimistically linking the Outer Banks with the North Carolina mainland. Driving - and I use that word loosely because it implies speed - up Route 12 to Duck, a jogger in 90 degree heat overtook us. The only solace I could find in this slow-moving, single lane pilgrimage was that it perfectly replicated the Hamptons in summer experience, but at half the price.
According to the Wright Brothers Memorial, it took Orville and Wilbur nine days to travel from Dayton, OH to Kitty Hawk - they had a plane to haul and no Wright Brothers Memorial Bridge to travel across - but I'm sure it seemed quicker than my journey last week.
I'll state for the record that people who vacay on the Cape, don't mean the one in South Africa; instead, they're referring to the area around Cape Cod, including Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket and another less fancy island that I forget the name of for now. A stint on the Cape involves a lot of money (usually old, but new hedge fund wealth is accepted in these recessionary times), extended family named "Preston" and "Buffy" and madras pants, none of which I'm in possession of.
Anyway, moving down the social scale a few notches, the Outer Banks is the other check box on the beach-bound survey of summer. This summer, the family and I packed a bathing suit and an iPod and headed south of the border to the Outer Banks.
To be fair, North Carolina is perfectly nice. There's nothing dreadful about it - beaches are sandy, skies are generally blue, rental houses are decorated in lighthouse and shell motifs . . . it's the journey that's the problem. Starting at the Virginia/North Carolina border, traffic trickled like molasses to its destination. It took several hours to reach the bridge optimistically linking the Outer Banks with the North Carolina mainland. Driving - and I use that word loosely because it implies speed - up Route 12 to Duck, a jogger in 90 degree heat overtook us. The only solace I could find in this slow-moving, single lane pilgrimage was that it perfectly replicated the Hamptons in summer experience, but at half the price.
According to the Wright Brothers Memorial, it took Orville and Wilbur nine days to travel from Dayton, OH to Kitty Hawk - they had a plane to haul and no Wright Brothers Memorial Bridge to travel across - but I'm sure it seemed quicker than my journey last week.
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