An Open Letter to the Class of 2008

Dear Class of 2008,

As you prepare to don your robes, sit in an unrelentingly hot and stuffy gymnasium and take bets on which one of your classmates will pass out first, keep in mind that this is just the first of many steps you each take in your new lives as Grown Ups.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Relax, Class of 2008, I’m only kidding! You won’t be Grown Ups until you’re at least 30. Though you ought to know that you will be expected to act like Grown Ups by all of the Grown Ups around you. Their idea of a good time is throwing teenagers like you headfirst into Real Life and putting their feet on top of your heads. I think it has something to do with being bitter over the fact that they have to have regular colonoscopies or something. No, really. Once you turn 50, doctors start treating your body as if it were a hotel room that some drug-crazed rock star has been destroying for a few decades.

But you’re all still young and relatively healthy, and what’s more, you’re still able to look at the world around you and see ways in which you can change it for the better. I imagine that by the time that analogy about rock stars and hotel rooms becomes a frightening reality for me, your generation will be well on its way towards creating cars that run on sheer willpower and light bulbs that can be eaten when they expire, thus effectively recycling themselves.

I imagine you may have also revolutionized medical technology as we know it. And, as someone whose mother and father just entered their fifties and came back from their first post-birthday hospital appointments full of stories about frightening equipment and terrifying procedures that would make Stephen King hide his head under a blanket, I’d like to ask that you get to the whole medical technology revolution first. Trust me, the edible light bulbs can wait.

Sincerely,
Amanda