With growing up, comes the inevitable loss of life’s little pleasures. One merely needs to read a BuzzFeed article about the “30 Things All 90s Kids Will Remember” to feel a stab to the heart, even as impending adult decisions need to be made.
I long for the days of Panic! At the Disco, Supré and first sips of goon, but most notably, I miss the days of “sorry mum said no.”
The authority of that one sentence is something that no other excuse can compare to. Sure, it was annoying when my mum actually didn’t let me go to a party unless there was adult supervision, but there were also times when I could not think of anything worse than getting drunk in a park in the middle of winter and didn’t even bother asking mum before using her as a scapegoat anyway. As I leave my teenage years I yearn to use my mum as an excuse to get out of things.
Some might say that maybe if you don’t want to go to something you should tell the host the truth. However, if I told someone who had been working on a start up sandalwood company that I feared attending their opening would be detrimental to my personal brand, it would offend the person. Moreover, I don’t want to lie to them and say that something has come up when they organised this event last year and it’s honestly just taken me the 365 days to think of an adequate excuse. In an ideal world, my mum could think that sandalwood opening was code for drug den and not let me go. This would create an instant pretext and I could spend the night working on my career as a full time raw vegan instagrammer.
But alas, this excuse is not viable. As I live at home, there are still certain events that my mum doesn’t like me going to and certain people she doesn’t like me hanging out with. There have been times where I’ve been asked to stay back at work til an ungodly hour or go to a suss party that my mum has been less than impressed by. Being the angelic beacon of hope that I am, I don’t want to lie to my mum, nor do I want to disappoint her. This is where the event becomes problematic, because if I said that my mum didn’t really want me going to a cool event my street cred would be in tatters, my boss would never give me shifts again and my mum would question my adulthood as I’d still be asking her permission to attend things. The hardest part of adulthood is not filing tax returns or paying bills, it’s going to events that you’d rather not attend because it’s the polite thing to do.
To put it simply, don’t invite me to your sandalwood start-up opening. My mum didn’t say no, nor do I have a feasible reason not to go; I just really, really, don’t want to come.
