Blown by the wind
I was watching tv in Utah over the weekend and I saw some reruns of old nickelodeon shows that older kids like us would remember. They had ren and stimpy, rugrats, rocko's modern life, doug, all that (when it was good), adventures of pete and pete and several other saturday night lineups from the mid 90's when nickelodeon was at its heighth. There was another that I vaguely remembered called "Round House" that I watched when I must have been in the 3rd grade. I was overrun with sadness and nostalgia. Round House was aired when Nickelodeon was geared towards an older audience during the night whereas now its just cranked acid shows with cheap CG animation. Nickelodeon was just what you watched back then, it was that cool. Round House starred a bunch of kids who I've never really seen again after the show was cancelled. They were as old as we are now and there were all different kinds of personality types and problems and orientations, rich/poor, some were from broken homes, a few have died already. It was a comic-drama that mostly took place in a warehouse or something and was about these kids who would act and sing and do skits and shit like that. It was pretty funny most of the time. It dealt with some issues pretty bluntly like hunger, AIDS, teen pregnancy, drugs, drinking etc. It wasn't colorful other than the acting, which was actually good. They were all kids who have stepped to the edge and overcome some pretty hard obstacles and hadn't officialy entered adulthood but were already living it. It instantly reminded me of all of us. We techinically are adults by legal standards, but we aren't quite into it yet both willfully and psychologically. I've noticed just from IM's and lj that we are still trying to find ourselves and what we really want in life and who we are. We never question our loyalty towards one another (no matter how irritating some of us may get) but as far as being truly grown up all the way, I don't think we even want to be there. Looking at adults in there 40's and 50's is depressing. They are all plunged in a midlife crisis, far in debt, marraige problems, and they have completely lost touch with their inner youth and any sense of fun they may have once had as a kid. I don't want to be that way and I'm sure no one else in the loop does either. I think I can safely say that although EJ, Robyn, Katie, Wendy, Matt, Justin, Jason, Chris, myslef and anyone else, we may be "adults" in the eyes of the law, but we will still want to be kids for the rest of our lives. I want to still have a good time when I'm older but still be young in heart. I want to be able to sit down (preferrably at the house in the living room or on the porch) with all of you, drunk as monkeys and talking about those past days we had together and knowing that we didn't waste our adolescent years. We should still be able to do the things we did back then and say to ourselves "those were the days, and there are a lot more ahead us." I don't want us to lose touch with who we are now, and always hang on to it.