GI Joe's and College Apps.

I love senior year. It's the best. There's absolutely no parallel in all of anything. It's like you can do things and seem like a mature person and you can do things and seem like a young kid. Both are okay. For instance, only in senior year can you make a campus visit, have a serious talk about your future with a college advisor, come home, go throw yourself down a slip 'n' slide for two hours, then go to work and earn a decent paycheck. You can never act too old or too young.

Fact: I have a box of GI Joe's by my toilet that I play with during my spare time when I take dumps.

Fact: I have a good reputation as a hard-working busboy at a Country Club. I treat members respectfully and they commend my good behavior and work ethic.

Fact: I have gotten drunk while staying up until three in the morning playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 with both of my older brothers on more than one occasion.

Fact: I run three to five times a week, along with carrying out a steady push-up/crunch regiment to keep myself in passable shape.

Fact: Yesterday I was playing with GI Joe's and using the bathroom while talking to a financial aid advisor at the University of Illinois about my epic fuck-up I referenced last week. (Long story short: What's my name?)

I think you get the point. The point we're at now in our lives is a perfect cross between maturity and relishing these last moments of childhood. The phrase "act your age" has almost no bearing on me because I might go to a symphony performance or play an hour of Robot Unicorn Attack when faced with that prompt.

Going forward through senior year summer, we have time for the bitter-sweetness and the nostalgia, but in these last breaths of childhood air, we have the opportunity to act like dumbasses for the last time. We made it through whatever educational path we chose, but soon we enter the transitional phase where education transforms into a working career. As of now the two are totally separate. So as I cross the bridge between childhood and adulthood, ready to be an adult, I go down it looking forward, but make no mistake, I have eyes in the back of my head. A four-eyed creature, savoring the past and salivating at the future.

Only kids can act like monsters.

--Eliot Sill