almost adult

Sucks Getting Older: 5 Reasons Why You Lose Your Friends

It suuucks getting older. The metabolism slows down, hangovers are death knells, and you can only shop in Forever 21 ironically.

Oh, and you lose friends. Have you ever had coffee or Skyped with someone who was once a good friend but you haven’t seen in years? After the initial thrill of catching up is over and you’ve gone through the list of mutual friends who’ve gotten fat, there’s then this staid awkwardness in the air. As you’ll sip those last dregs of coffee and bring up a few cutesy “Remember when’s,” you feel that those fuzzy-warm feelings of friendship past are there but something’s just different. When someone inevitably chimes that they’ve got to run, you’ll both promise to catch up more often and make nebulous plans to hang out again soon. And it’ll never happen.

I’m thinking about this because of this recent iVillage article, “Is it Normal to Lose Friends as You Get Older?” No need to sift through Stanford University psychologist Laura Carstensen’s “socioemotional selectivity theory.” Duh, yes, it’s perfectly normal to lose friends as you age, and it doesn’t need a fancy name, it just sucks. As we age, we change, and it’s up to you or your friends to either accept it or not. Here, five reasons why we lose friends:

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Most Useless College Degrees

Many college seniors and grad students will be walking across the stage this month and next. What better way to greet them to the big bad world than to tell them how time/money-wasting its been to further their education!

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The Four Stages of Getting an Internship

Whether it’s unpaid, pitifully paid, or for academic credit, internships are a necessary evil for many Almost Adults on their way to a full-time gig. Internships are highly coveted among emerging adults who seek internship experience in order to pad their resume for this hyper-competitive job economy (even if it’s for little-to-nothing wages). In fact, three-quarters of the 10 million students enrolled in four-year colleges and universities will work as interns at least once before graduation, and up to half gave their services free or had to pay for going to work, according to a recent article from The Economist.

There are the obvious criticisms: Nick Clegg, Britain’s deputy prime minister, has tried to ban them because it favors the wealthy and privileged for being able to, essentially, afford a job. This month, NY Times contributor Ross Perlin wrote how many naysayers consider internships rife with exploitation, a cheap way for universities to provide credit, and a violation of labor laws.

No stranger to the life of the intern, since 2007, I’ve had stints at a fashion start-up, a publishing company, a travel magazine, a television network and now at a Web site. I’ve been through the good, bad, and ugly, and due to confidentiality agreements and for the sake of future employment (read: coward) I’ll stay zip on how each were. Still, I’d like to salute my fellow interns (and aspiring interns, too) for toiling under the bottom rung of the corporate ladder with a comic interpretation of the four stages of getting an internship:

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Living with (my) Mom

LA over Spring Break was glorious because it means going back to the comforts of home—fresh bedsheets, home-cooked meals, cable. My home however has a few added attractions: my two bratty man-boy cousins who are classic examples of the trend social scientists like to call “boomerang kids.” The Pew Research Center finds that 13 percent of parents with grown children say their kids move back home due to the tough economy in their 2009 report. Interested in investigating this phenomenon, I decided to ask the best source I know: My mother, Davis Chow. 

A hardworking single mother to my 16-year-old sister and me, she spread her mothering further when she opened her home to my cousins. The brothers, who shall go unnamed ‘cause I’m super nice, moved into our house after graduation. (The younger one got a BA, the older one got a JD from law school.) They came in 2008. They are still there. Now ages 26 and 29, they fit snuggly and stereotypically into the “failure to launch” category of Almost Adulthood where 20somethings decide they are too unemployed/too single/too broke/too comfortable/too fed up with washing their own dishes to live on their own so they moved back home.

So what’s the deal with boomerang kids? Here’s my mom’s hilariously honest and slightly enabling take on my mooching cousins.

And yes, I’m getting back at them for picking on me all week, nananaaaa.

1. Your two nephews moved into our house. How the heck did that happen?

Our family is very close. They’re both single and didn’t have their own house to go back to since their mom [my sister] moved in with her boyfriend and they didn’t want to live with him.

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The Seven Almost Adults

So what’s an “almost adult” anyway? Ah, like the plentiful fish in the sea, they come in all kinds of stripes. Confusing proverb aside, 20somethings fit into seven very general categories that I just made up for the purpose of sounding like a smarty pants…and so I can show off my awesome drawing skillz.

The roles aren’t gender specific and one can fit multiple shoes. Women can be commitment-phobic workaholics and men can have an existential crisis while being so freaking single it’s comic.

Which one are you?? 

The Failure to Launch

This foo’ is happily unemployed, still lives at home, and doesn’t do his own laundry simply because he doesn’t have to. Recreational activities include air guitar, naps, and hitting college keggers to tell freshmen how much cooler he was back in the day but actually impresses no one. He’s also considering grad school just to delay the real world a bit longer. 

Why don’t you just grow up already? “Dude, free rent.”

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