Here we are, 7th grade Algebra and we're talking in the back while Mrs. Smith is jiggling out a cosine on the chalk-board. First things first — the woman's built like a tank. Her ass is impossibly wide. She looks like a cartoon character that swallowed a kayak width-wise. Needless to say, she does not command much respect from us, her unwilling audience. I've been playing Tetris on my Gameboy for most of the class period. I sit in the front row, in plain view, and I've stopped caring whether she'll notice. She catches me, pausing for effect with a look to the others. I don't notice her till she turns off my game with a single meaty finger and smiles to the class without lips or mirth.

"If you want to be treated like adults, I expect you to act like adults . . ." .

This is something adults always do — they take back any half-formed maturity you might have had, at the slightest provocation, asking for respect while giving none in return. And there's a good reason for it: it belies the insecurity, however small, that, in spite of a chronological head start and a steady, inevitable sagging, they haven't gotten any farther. At any point this side of death, it's hard to believe you're an adult — you never get over the childhood insecurity of not knowing what it means to "act like one". You have to be told, be given signs, and no one seems to agree on what they are. .

Luckily, someone's figured this one out for us. The All-American court of public opinion — as interpreted, this time around, by researchers at the University of Chicago — has answered the question on which Talmudic scholarship and Hegelian dialectic can only speculate. In 2003, reports the Associated Press, Americans, on average, decided that a person of 26.2 years of age can justifiably be called an adult. According to the survey, most people consider a grown-up that person who has finished college, moved out of mom's basement, is financially independent, and has produced offspring within the confines of marriage. One of the conclusions that has been drawn from the study is that Americans have come to accept a sort of extended adolescence. We, as a cultural group, generally put college before child-rearing, chronologically, if not in ultimate priority. An indication of the shift, is the fact that, in the '50's the most common age for marriage was 18, an age now relegated to the legal purchase of tobacco products and self-absorption. Though most respondents considered raising children to be the final hurdle to the big A, 73% say that completing one's education is the most important. First, in the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that I have just finished my junior year of college. I was a member of the class of 2000 in high school, was born in 1982. I turned 21 recently enough to still have clothes stained with vomit. I doubt this makes me material for adulthood. But, you see, that's the confusing part. That's why we need this poll in the first place. The law says that I am tried as an adult if I commit a crime of any kind, 18 is the cut-off. I can buy porn and tobacco. I can get married, drive, be sent off to war, and vote in elections; basically, anything that might make me an active member of the human community, short of automobile rental. So here's why I'm confused: If I am to take this literally, I am right on target to graduate from college, before the deadline, (chosen by YOU, America) of 22 years and change. Doing good so far. Here's what gets me, I am already supposed to be financially independent around now, working a full-time job so that I can support a family when I'm 24.5. Let's be honest. I've been in the red since day one, and with my ridiculously priced education training me for little more than titillating cockatil-party banter, gainful employment is a far-off dream. I can't convince a woman to stick around for the night, much less for the time necessary to bring a pregnancy to term. Even 26 sounds way too early for me to have the well-being of any living thing under my care. I can't handle house plants. There's another side too. In those first few days of "Gulf War: Episode 2," when the narcotic war-cloud was still hanging pretty low, I sat in the glow of CNN for hours. It was maddening. The northern front wasn't open yet, the troops were too far South, still rolling out of Kuwait. I stopped blinking for a while, knowing that I would be letting my country down if I missed even the tiniest niblet of war-coverage. In the interest of a broader outlook on the issue, I switched to MTV, the younger face of war journalism. This seemed appropriate, because these people on camera were just kids — my age, a few years younger or older. The MTV audience was privy to well-edited montages of desert-training, Coldplay in the background. We got to know about their fears and hopes for the future. We saw them call out to their families, shouts out to mom, yes, but also to their wives, husbands, children. Thousands of miles from the love they left behind, almost as far from me, they were driving into the desert with a loaded gun. This was what upset me more than anything else I saw in the next week or two. This war, no matter how I felt about it, was being waged by people whose places I could easily have taken. They weren't so different, young Americans with their own plans. But then they were. They had a kind of conviction and resolve that was so foreign to me, a self-assurance that I had no counterpart to. Some would go to college later, some wouldn't. If they were kids when they left, were they adults when they came back? Some didn't make it home. Is a bullet in the head as good as a paycheck and a stroller, a college education? —- I've been working my way through Everything is Illuminated, a book that's got me by the eyelashes with both hands, and the author-narrator makes no secret that he is writing this at about my age, 21 years old. It leaves me energized, excited about the prospect of some next generation that I am a part of; it is a book I want to write. But, this begs the question, ultimately unfair: What have I been doing with my time? Where is my novel? Arthur Rimbaud, one of the premiere poets of the modern era, French or otherwise, swore off his literary work at age 19, having spent the last four or five years drinking, freeloading, and ruining the life of his pitiful, melodramatic lover, the poet Paul Verlaine. Of course, this does not mean I want a life like his, running funs and coffee through Colonial seaports in eastern Africa, always with some sort of tropical fever. No, that's not my ideal, but there's a part of me that resents the narrow track I've followed, that this poll spells out all too clearly. Are we to be prolific? If so, in what sense? Do we have to create something lasting or can we just glow in the center and quickly burn out, like Jack Kerouac's friends, and make everyone around us stand amazed for a moment? College is this time that we are supposed to have, to be young and play grab-ass with the greater world of ideas and experience. But the problems with this are logical and well-documented. For many the experience lacks in pith, with all of the sitting in dimly lit library stacks, searching for rare treatises on epic verse. For much more college has nothing to do with academics. Either way, it is the chance to extend one's childhood, that time in which we hold no responsibilities, to its maximum. It's the time when we can be self-absorbed children with the appetites - physical, intellectual - of an adult. For still more, it is none of these things, just a voucher one receives that can attests that an education was committed - a proof beyond all empirical testing that the rite of passage, merely ritual, has been performed. My Dad told me once that his father had a test for adulthood. My grandfather told him that the day they went out to dinner and my Dad picked up the check, he would consider him an adult. Equal. Money, success, can do a lot to get you closer to adulthood. Showing that you're worth something, to someone. But all of this, it just doesn't work. Chronological achievement, the ability to last 16, 18, 26 years, is no measure of maturity. Nor is marriage, money, or least of all, procreative sex, an indication of reason and responsible behavior. These are compromises made for the sake of statistical analysis, without any meaning for an individual. Isn't it liberating, then, that one need never live otherwise than as an individual? It's still a mystery, despite the best attempts of modern science to explain it, where adulthood begins or ends, or if it even has to happen at all. It doesn't seem to be the trappings of status, independence, the passing on of genetic code. It has begun to sound like responsibility, action with meaning — marching toward life, instead of slinking away. I don't, can't, have it figured out, but what all of this has in common is that I don't give a shit what the average American says on the issue.

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