To any adolescent it may concern:

When you grow up, your old friends will do different things.

One will go to prison. Another will get married and have twelve babies. A third will join a group of anarchists in Seattle only to quit the group later. Another will become a career politician who accepts bribes from banks that will beg him or her to kick people like your anarchist friend out of groups like the one in Seattle. This bribery is, in the end, pointless seeing as how your anarchist friend already quit. Your corrupt politician friend doesn’t care. He has money. Money becomes disproportionately important when you grow up.

By “disproportionate” I mean that an average penny occupies .03 cubic millimeters of space in the universe whereas an average newborn baby occupies 336 cubic inches of space in the universe. Also, the baby can think. Regardless of how much more space, time and imagination his or her baby takes, regardless of how his or her baby will tell jokes and make more babies when it grows up, regardless of how it is metaphysically impossible to make more pennies by rubbing his or her pennies together, your friend who grows up to become a corrupt politician will still care more about his or her pennies than his or her babies.

As said prior, your anarchist friend will quit.

Some friends become doctors who deliver babies, some become doctors who deliver sermons, some become fly fishermen who use doctors, some doctor legal documents in ways that could send them to prison like your first friend. You will need a primary doctor for primary care and secondary doctors for secondary care of things like your eyes and your ears and your teeth. When you get even older, you’ll need tertiary doctors called “specialists” for parts of your body you will have forgotten about, even though your biology teacher is teaching you about them in high school. These include, but are not limited to, your thyroid, your pancreas, your kidneys, your medulla oblongata and your sphincter of Oddi. Watch out for your sphincter of Oddi. If your sphincter of Oddi begins to protest, you’ll feel it. By “it” I mean something between molten gold poured on your head like Viserys and death by paper cuts. Your tertiary doctors may or may not help you through your living hell. Your friends will. Stick with your friends since your primary and secondary and tertiary doctors will disagree with one another. Your friends will make it all okay. As I said, many of your friends become doctors anyway.

The girls grow fertile (or not), the guys grow impotent (or not) and many get their secret tubes tied or snipped. Tubes become the enemies of old age for one reason or another. Poor tubes. Your friends will snip and tie their secret tubes mainly to keep from creating more babies and to save more pennies. The tube-process is a procedure done by tertiary doctors to turn human beings into walking pennies, enabling them to rub up against one another without creating more human beings. Sometimes when your tube-snipped friends will rub up against each other, they’ll make babies anyway. This is because adult human beings are much closer in design to babies than to pennies. Don’t get mad at your friends for growing ignorant of this simple truth. If you can forget the part of biology that covered the medulla oblongata, it’s okay for them to forget the biological difference between human flesh and monetary copper. Especially if the ignorant one is your politician friend.

Many of them move. This comes from the law of entropy in the discipline known as THERMODYNAMICS. The law of entropy states, more or less, that things move from order into chaos. Because of the law of entropy, the order of high school will fade into the disorder of constant address changes, deaths and long-distance phone calls that may or may not cost your more money than normal calls, depending on the corporation responsible for manipulating your cell phone service.

However, many of your friends grow closer in spite of entropy. This comes from the law of attraction in the discipline known as DIME ROMANCE NOVELS. (Also PHYSICS, but most of your friends won’t buy PHYSICS books when they grow up). The law of attraction in the second case states that objects move toward one another. In the first case, the law says some objects evoke interest, pleasure or liking in human beings for one reason or another. Sometimes both are the case. When two of your friends move toward one another and evoke interest, pleasure and liking, they will combine the disciplines of DIME ROMANCE NOVELS and PHYSICS underneath the super-discipline known as MARRIAGE.

Most will begin their discipline of MARRIAGE with a discipline known as a WEDDING. For the WEDDING, they will ask you to spend lots of pennies on them to enable them to one day to make babies. Save up several thousand dollars now for plane tickets, cast iron skillets and costumes. The costumes are the least important thing in the discipline known MARRIAGE but the most important thing in the subcategory AMERICAN under the discipline of WEDDING, so start saving now. If you recognize inconsistencies between the disciplines WEDDING and MARRIAGE, it’s because your friends have categorized their WEDDING under DIME ROMANCE NOVELS and their MARRIAGE under THERMODYNAMICS. The ones that last will have kept the tension between DIME ROMANCE NOVELS and PHYSICS through practicing the law of attraction. The ones that don’t will eventually ask you to buy more costumes for other WEDDINGS. In order to save yourself money, time and tears, remember to encourage your friends not only to file WEDDING as a subcategory under the discipline of MARRIAGE, but also to spend more time on the meta-category MARRIAGE than on the subcategory of WEDDING.

All of this may seem confusing, but disciplines become important when you grow up. Keep to your disciplines and stick with your close friends and you might make it through that moment when one of your tertiary doctors says, “Your sphincter of Oddi is broken.”

Love,

A Former Adolescent

PS> If you regulars hated that, feel free to mock and jeer and heckle below.