awkward age

a song that describes you as a teenager

In this culture, the teenage experience seems so prevalent. Examples of this seem entirely unnecessary. Are we to assume it's the only universal? They like to say high school is the best time of your life. It wasn't. Even when I was waist deep within it, I knew it was a trap and a means to maintain horny kids in pens and give them excessive restrictions and barriers whilst feeding them full of false hope. The summer between my tenth and eleventh grade I was several months into my first job. Even though it was flipping burgers, dropping fries, and deflecting sexual harassment from my boss, I felt this huge charge inside me that proved that school had nothing on reality, on working for a living. Somehow I stayed in school, keeping up my grades in courses I gave a fuck about. But I knew there was more going on outside that eight foot chain link fence that lined the high school property.

It was a time of trying hard to express myself honestly and rarely if ever being heard doing it, as if the language I was utilizing was not only foreign but equally not worth the time of those in my vicinity. If I could talk to then me now I would reassure him that this was something to be embraced and not fought against. I questioned and propositioned alternate points of view than I was being fed and was building the genesis of intellectual, personal, and spiritual independence. Logic and rationale were often at odds. I ended up at church through coercion and after much objection, finding there lasting lessons that were far from the ones that were taught, like rich kids do a lot of drugs, church-going teens are total hypocrites, and Pretty Hate Machine sounds really good headed north on I-95 in a fogged up church van.