The grownups' table

A face looks at me with recognition as it pokes out of a neat suit and tie that looks cute on a person so short, and I suppress a cringe as I anticipate what's coming next. "Matzke!" he says with a smile so big I'm afraid it will pop the whiteheads on his cheeks. This face is far too young to belong to someone who is my junior by only two or three years.\nThis past weekend, I agreed to judge a speech meet for my high school forensics team. My reputation preceded me, thanks to the propaganda of my former coach, but the faces around me were strangers with braces and without the ability to vote. Between judging, I sat among them in the cafeteria, wolfing down an overpriced slice of cold pizza while it was still too early for a sane person to be awake. \nIt was there, sitting in silence, that I realized I don't have a place at the kids' table anymore. \nLess than a month away from the closing of my teen years, this is a fact I've been unconsciously wrestling with for a while. It was only about a week earlier I came to appreciate the full extent of my immersion into the world of the grown-ups' table. One day, my parents had VH1's "One Hundred Most Shocking Moments in Rock and Roll" on TV, and I happened to wander into the room as the show was discussing George Michael coming out of the closet after being arrested for propositioning sex to an undercover police officer in a public restroom.\n"That's so seedy that the police would do that," I said. "Not that I approve of sex in public restrooms."\n"Your father and I had sex in a public restroom once," my mother responded nonchalantly.\nAfter the subsequent dry heaves subsided, I took a moment to step back and reflect on the greater implications of this dialogue and of my mother's rather disturbing revelation. My parents have always prided themselves on being unashamed extraverts, laughing with delight at each shock to my and my brother's sensibilities, but this casually delivered personal factoid had to mark some passage into a new stage of my life. No longer is sex a taboo subject of casual conversation, a topic relegated to birds-and-bees discussions of technical aspects or morality monologues about condoms and responsibility. Such was not the case when I left for school a year and a half ago.\nWith the big 2-0 approaching, I've been going through a sort of quarter-life crisis. Sure, you're an "adult" at 18, endowed with the ability to vote, sign legal documents, buy porn and be drafted into the military -- but you also hold onto that moniker of "teenager," an unofficial license to lack any sense of cleanliness, eat nothing but a hot fudge sundae for lunch or spend an entire paycheck on nothing but CDs. \nIf I waste away the day watching Jim Henson movies, I'm a lazy teenager wasting away a day -- if I do the same thing in my twenties, suddenly I'm pathetic. Okay, perhaps that isn't the best example.\nNonetheless, my point stands. Some anxiety necessarily comes with giving up the kids' table and joining the grown-ups for good. And while I'm saddened at my inability to connect with the bright-eyed youngsters who have taken my place on the high school speech team, I enjoy the still-new equal footing I have when I talk to fellow adults (moments of disgust with parents notwithstanding). Just because I'm at the table doesn't mean I have to act the part. \nNow if you'll excuse me, it's lunch time and I've got a hot fudge sundae with my name on it.