The glove compartment isn't accurately named -- and everybody knows it

The weekend was spent staying up into the wee hours of the morning and lamenting our newfound adulthood.

For some reason, I wrote that sentence on Sept. 4 of last year, intending to follow it with other sentences, but I didn't. It's been harder and harder to maintain this blog, perhaps because so many come here from friends' and relatives' blogs expecting to be just as entertained. I had started that post in September to talk about post-graduate life, but I must have lost interest.

That weekend had been spent, though, with a fellow graduate and two fifth-year friends. We stayed up watching a crappy movie on the Sci-Fi Channel on which a computerized saber-toothed tiger was set loose in a Jurassic-Park like theme park. It liked to behead people using its teeth. Lizzie McGuire's dad was in it, and we wondered about his future career possibilities while stealing music from each other's iPods. (Looking at IMDb, it appears to be called "Attack of the Sabertooth." Enjoy.) When the drizzle began, my friend (we'll call him Jeff) suggested we go for a walk. Oh wait -- a bike ride! What else is there to do at 2 a.m. in West Texas?

So we drove to his house to commandeer his (male) roommates' bikes. My legs were too short for most of them, and my flip flops had no traction, so I was stuck riding a stunt bike, barefoot, through the late-night drizzle. Let's ride around campus! The trek began well enough, but soon I lost my balance and couldn't start riding again. My friends had to keep stopping, trying to explain to me just how to ride a bike while trying not to laugh and enjoy the circles they were biking around me.

I rode for 10 seconds, then stopped. Then I was stuck for several minutes. Repeat. My feet were killing me, so I traded bikes with another friend and attempted to get going. Too hard. After standing on the curb and kick-starting the bike, I was able to maintain a balance and ride for about two minutes. Then my friend (we'll call her Courtney) rode up alongside me on the sidewalk, trying to tell me how to shift the gears and forcing me to look at the handles. There went the sidewalk, and there went my bare feet, right into a pile of mud. I couldn't get back on the bike, at least not for a while. I was that kid on the playground begging for recess to be over so they can go read. "This is the opposite of fun. Can we please go home now?"

We retreated, having made it not even a fourth of the way around campus. Riding back to the house seemed easy, for some reason. I drove home, accompanied by me fellow graduate, to hang my muddy jeans up and wonder why our spontaneous adventure had floundered.

The fifth-years graduated in December in a lackluster ceremony I plaid solitaire through. My warnings about the overratedness of adulthood had to be learned the hard way for them, though, but at least I was able to entertain them by being a 22-year-old who can't ride a bike.