I need a vacation.
Or at least that’s what I’ve been telling myself for the past several months, and in between planning issues of the newspaper, working, doing homework, and, at the bottom of the list, working on my social/love life I’ve been trying to plan a cruise with several friends.
I’ve been hoping to go somewhere like Mexico, because of the lack of a drinking age, so I could completely cut loose and go crazy for a week or so. However, I can’t go. I have had enough money for a cruise since before this semester began. I can’t go because I’m 19.
Royal Caribbean, which owns most of the cruise lines advertised on sites such as Expedia and Travelocity, has a policy which requires people to be 21 if they are reserving a “state room” alone.
“No guest under the age of 21 will be reserved in a stateroom unless accompanied by an adult 21 years of age, or older” is the direct text taken from their website.
The cruise idea wasn’t a really well thought out one for me anyways because the drinking ages on the cruises is 21 unless you have a parent sign a waiver. This brings me, in an incredibly roundabout way to my point, it sucks being 19.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to say my life is worse than anyone else’s, quite the opposite in fact. I just find it incredibly inequitable that I can vote, I can smoke, and I can even be drafted to be sent overseas to die in a foreign land, but I can’t drink, I can’t gamble, and no insurance company will trust me behind the wheel of a car until I’m well beyond 21.
Furthermore, despite the rights I do have I’m not an adult. I’m in some kind of weird place where I’m technically emancipated from my parents, but I’m not considered an adult by society.
Usually cultures have some kind of way of telling the boys and girls in their societies that they are now men or women. Not true in modern western society. It seems like adolescence is just a series of hoops to jump through until at some point you realize “Wow, I have kids and a mortgage, when did that happen?”
To the government, being an adult is all about being 18, but no one is actually an adult until they mature emotionally, to some extent.
For my example, I guess my first rite of passage happened when I got my driver’s license. It took me forever, but one year and a half after I got my learner’s permit I finally passed the test, after three failed attempts. After that I drove to school a few times, but it didn’t change my life.Then I graduated from high school. Nothing changed with that.
Last year I turned 18, and voting’s pretty cool, but aside from that being 18 is no different than 17 except I can be tried as an adult in court.
I just got a job last year, that’s changed my life more than anything else so far and has made me feel more like an adult.It’s probably too much to hope for one event to turn me into an adult. In this society at least it looks like I’ll take a while longer to grow up, but at least I know I’m gonna enjoy it when I get there.