Today I realized something.
Do you know what the first sign of getting old is? You start having crushes on celebrities younger than you, and who have accomplished more.
Hear me out. When you are young, as we all were, all of your celeb crushes were on older people. I can't describe how many middle school girls fell in love with Leo DiCaprio after Titanic, or how many young boys were enamored by Carmen Electra or one of her counterparts. The sex icons (or whatever you want to call them) you looked up to were adults, for the most part.
But, eventually, the day comes when you are looking up a crush on IMDb, and you notice their birthday is after yours. It's so surprising the first few times it happens. It shatters your schema of the celebrity crowd as a whole, which used to be made of two subtypes: the child actors and the adults (aka all other famous people). Child actors could either be cute or annoying. Only the adults could be hot. This is the day you realize that you are growing up. Obviously, you noticed the hair growing in weird places, the change in your social setting, the new feelings, etc., but now it is REALLY dawning on you.
It's strange how you can simultaneously know something, and still not believe it. It's like a sexually transmitted infection; you know you can get it if you engage in unprotected sexual activity...but you still don't believe you will. Of course, this is more of a personal fable attribution or availability heuristic, making it an imperfect analogy, but I think you understand my point.
And if you think this experience is bad, wait until you realize that the daydream you had the other day about dating that hottie you're crushing on may be illegal in 43 states. Which brings me to my next point: high schools should have classes that teach essential life skills, like if what you are longing to do with you-know-who is illegal in your state. And how to do your taxes, for crying out loud. The average college graduate can't fill out the W2 for that career he/she has been preparing for for the past four years. Furthermore, high schools need to teach how to understand dense "legal-ese" before they accumulate a mountain for debt with their first credit card in college because they didn't understand the terms and conditions they had agreed to. Seriously, no one understands that crap. I have a friend applying to law school who can't explain to me the terms of use of tv.com (on second thought, maybe it's better she doesn't get into law school. she really isn't that bright). Well, since I have totally forgotten my original topic, I'm going to go now.
Tune in next time for: "My political ramblings: Diary of a Mad White Man" if you are crazy enough to give a baker's **** what I think.
****Disclaimer
In this blog post, I used a lot of slang, and much less political correctness than I usually allow in my online posts, considering the low likely hood of anyone reading it. If you found it offensive, I apologize. I would like to state for the record that I am most certainly NOT a pedophile or a rapist (statutorily or otherwise) in any way. I have yet to even have a relationship with anyone younger than me (I skipped a grade in elementary school, making my high school peers older than me). And, in case anyone was wondering, I was quoting Zoolander in my blog topic.