OREOS MAKE YOU FAT.

...and that was what I took from the passage, back in my Wannabe Beatnik period of early 1995. I was going to Cottey College, trying to figure out who I was, recovering from a bad breakup, going through that "Oh yeah? Watch me lose weight and be all like Sandy in Grease and then there's a carnival and guess who's in skintight black and feeling sassy? Oh, and I can sing now" phase that girls go through when they're deeply hurt and deeply disillusioned thanks to unrealistic movie plots.

So there we were, on the cusp of 1995, and a friend of mine shows me a copy of The Portable Beat Reader.

That was IT. I decided that these beatniks were me, that I was them, that we're all the same deeply tortured soul deep down, man, and isn't life an awful trip when it comes down to it, and Everybody Hurts...sometimes.

...and on and on. Sure, I didn't live in a stripped-down, rat-infested room in Manhattan, and, fine, maybe I wasn't running from the law and trying to find myself in a warm bottle of tequila in Mexico, but this Beat Generation really GOT it.

But there was one piece that resonated with me more than anything else, and it wasn't by Kerouac or Corso or Ginsberg or Cassady.

It was by a woman named Diane DiPrima, and the paragraph that so captivated me, that WAS 19-year-old me, that cut through my early-college pretentiousness to my vulnerable core, went a little something like this:

*Credit, Diane DiPrima, Dinners and Nightmares: What I Ate Where*

i remember the winter the january i ate nothing but oreos...to get through january in manhattan is hard, to get through january and february the same year almost impossible.
one of the best ways to get through i found was this of eating oreos. except it makes you fat. really fat. even if you don't eat anything else and you think, shit, how can i get fat i haven't had breakfast or lunch or anything like that, but don't kid yourself. OREOS MAKE YOU FAT.

And even though I wanted to look like Sandy and blow everyone away at the carnival, even though I wanted to do all of the amazing things and be rich and famous before I exited my teens and maybe date Brian from NBC's Wings, the reality was that I went to class and worked full time and came home at 10 p.m. with a box of donuts from Ramey's and watched Jerry Springer until I fell asleep next to a by-then-empty donut box.

So it was that essay that spoke to me, and provided a strange comfort that I reached for, like a security blanket, again and again. It was THAT essay I returned to, not Ginsberg's Howl or Burroughs' Naked Lunch, which were amazing, true, but a little intimidating.

DiPrima, man, she GOT me.

And it all came crashing back to my consciousness today, when I got off work, came home, made a Peach Caramel Butterscotch cobbler, mindlessly ate a row of Oreos...

...and I was 19 again, reaching absently into the box of donuts before realizing it was empty, listening to the crowd chant for Jerry and wondering what exactly I was going to do with my life.

It's mind-blowing, because my son is almost to that age of all questions and no answers, and he's experiencing some of those same feelings that were trapped and fluttering in my rib cage, that I tried to smother with those Oreos and donuts and Springer, and it just reminds me how really, really hard it can be to be on that cusp of adulthood and feel that pressure to know what you're supposed to do with the rest of your life, that it's time to be a grown-up and there's nothing you can do about it, and where are you going to go to college and what's your major and where will you live and who will you room with and here's a new town and oh by the way classes are all over campus and you don't know every single person you see and these are the best years of your life, kid, cherish them!

How RIDICULOUS is that? I wouldn't go back to that uncertainty and that confusion for anything, even if it meant being young and free again. Because it wasn't until I was older that I was set free.

You can HAVE 15-21. I don't WANT those years back. Give me 39 any day.

To the Class of 2015 that I watched grow up, I wish the very best for you. But it is this uncertainty, this fear, that make the good times feel so much better. Out of the darkness comes the dawn, insert your own cliche here, but they're true.

It WILL get better. High school isn't going to be the best time of your life. You have so many experiences ahead, good and bad, light and dark.

FEEL it. Collect those life experiences, because these are the things that you learn from, and that is far more than you'll ever learn in a college classroom.

I'm proud of you guys.

And it's okay to admit that maybe you don't know everything.

Illustration courtesy of Hyperbole and a Half, Allie Brosh (check her out!)