The Beginning of the End
of My Uninspired Adulthood

By Jamie Norton

Hi. My name is Jamie, a broke 27-year-old with a useless BA whose days of getting by on his boyish charm have long since passed.

As they say (and I still don’t know who “They” are - probably just some discreet, multimillion-dollar company that sits around all day coming up with overused slogans): “Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional.” If you look at my birth certificate and do the math, you’ll find out that I’m almost 30. But if you look around my apartment, you’ll think that I’m about nine (except for the porn). I have baseball action figures on my shelves. I have Fruity Pebbles in the cupboard and ice cream sandwiches in the freezer. Just the other day, I bought a wiffle ball bat. Yes. A wiffle ball bat. I am doing everything I can in my battle against time. And an ongoing battle it is.

I grew up in a small town in Vermont where our best athletes were the two kids in town who could tie their own shoes, and the hottest girls around were those who had as many as five straight teeth (each with at least one white one). The point is, it didn’t take much to get noticed.

I was always one of the top four or five students in my class of nine (10 if you counted the 34-year-old with Asperger’s who always wandered around reciting Lionel Ritchie lyrics). My parents always told me how “special” I was (and they used that word a lot) , and all the teachers who weren’t mired in a chalkdust-induced state of Alzheimer’s always told me how far I’d go in the big, blue world.

Well, I’ve been out in said world for almost 10 years now, and I have to tell you - it’s not for me. I went to college and found out I wasn’t so smart. When I looked for a job, I learned that I wasn’t so talented. So my transition from phenom to flop was admittedly a square kick in the eyebrows. So after receiving several average grades in college, getting an average job making average money and developing an average credit rating, I decided one thing:

I don’t have to put up with this.

It’s been a long, rocky road since the glory days of boundless freedom and unsubstantiated acclaim. But I have to believe I can get those days back. I’m only about 15 years removed from playing tetherball in the back yard, eating Freeze Pops on the back steps, and playing Super Mario 3 until I was too tired to think about my multiplication tables. It’s not like it was a generation ago. I can get those days back.

So that is my endeavor from here on out. I WILL be nine again. I don’t care how many toys I have to buy, how much candy I have to eat, and how many cartoon marathons I have to watch. It doesn’t matter how many Nintendo games I have to re-triumph, how many Fluffernutters I have to devour, or how many frogs I have to compromise. One way or another, I WILL be nine again.

The process has already begun. I bought a He-Man DVD. I have every existing episode of Voltron saved to my Tivo. Every now and then, I put on my old Little League uniform and run around the bases backwards. And just yesterday, I had a sleepover with a bunch of fourth-graders. I simply can’t be stopped.

Anyway, I’ll be in touch. If you’ll excuse me, I have to go make a glass of chocolate milk and then take a nap before my big kickball tournament.