Ben and I had this conversation once about the moment at which you're officially grown up. We batted around a number of gender-specific ideas. Like for guys, it's the first time you shave or your bar mitzvah or the general onset of puberty, and some other things that in retrospect were pretty stupid. For girls, the first time you're called ma'am or Mrs., or your first period, or your first orgasm with a guy, which is kind of funny when you think about it, because a girl can go until she's like forty and never know what an orgasm feels like because men are stupid. Deke walked into the middle of the conversation and suggested the first time you finish a Big Mac all by yourself. “I knew then that I was a man,” he said.” Ben and I had other ideas. We wanted to come up with a definitive, unisex occasion, but then we realized that in this world there seemed to be a fairly alarming percentage of the population that, even at ninety years old and on their deathbed, had arrested their own development at or around age thirteen.

So all things being equal, we figured that not everyone gets to have the moment we decided on, that dizzying moment of jaded clarity when you look in the mirror and say, “Well, I must be grown up because I sure as hell ain’t a kid anymore.”