Written by holytaco

If you’re a Jew or a Mexican girl, there’s a specific day where you officially become an adult. For everyone else, becoming a grown-up is a gradual process, and most of the time you don’t realize that you’ve become an adult until it’s too late. So, for everyone who doesn’t get to have one of those awesome “you’re a grown-up now” parties, we’ve created this helpful list of 7 Signs That You’re an Adult.

1. You Pay for Things that You Can’t Hold in Your Hand

As a child, commerce is simple: you give the ice cream man a handful of change, and you receive a Ninja Turtle popsicle with gumball eyes. You can hold it in your hand. You can taste it. You can compare the position of the gumball eyes on the actual popsicle to the position that they’re supposed to be in, according to the picture on the wrapper, which you can also hold in your hand. Even after the popsicle is gun, while you’re chewing on the rock-hard gumball eyes, you can hold the sticky popsicle stick, the proof that you received something tangible in exchange for your money. As an adult, most of the things you pay for are seemingly unquantifiable. I’ve never held health insurance in my hand, nor have I ever proudly displayed my newly-purchased Account Maintenance to my friends, even though I pay two dollars for one every month. I don’t even know what a night/weekend minute looks like, but I’ve purchased hundreds of them as an adult.

2. You Feel the Emotion “Shame”

When you’re a kid and you shit your pants, you feel embarrassed, but when you’re an adult and you shit your pants, you feel shame. Shame means that you’ve done something that there’s absolutely no excuse for, and kids have an excuse for everything, in that they’re kids. They’re like David Lynch films: nobody expects them to make any sense, and sometimes they applaud them for actively not doing so. You may ask what the difference is between embarrassment and shame, so here’s a helpful gauge: If you’re unable to get an erection because of something that you’ve done, that there, that’s shame.

3. People Don’t Think It’s Cute When You F*ck Up

When I was a kid, my mom kept a bag of Skittles on top of a bookshelf in the livingroom. One day, I decided to climb the bookshelf and get to the Skittles. Predictably, the bookshelf couldn’t handle the weight of even my tiny body, and it promptly toppled over. I had just enough time to leap to safety before it crashed to the floor, spilling books and Skittles everywhere. I wasn’t in it for the books, so I quickly gathered up handfuls of Skittles and started cramming them into my mouth. My parents rushed in shortly after and, seeing that nothing was broken and I wasn’t injured, they giggled at my daring behavior, and took plenty of pictures of me sitting in the wreckage of the toppled bookshelf with mouthfuls of skittles before they cut me off and put the shelf back in its place. My boss has some Girl Scout Cookies on top of his bookshelf in his office, bt if I tried to pull that shit now, I’d be fired immediately.

4. You Stop Receiving Hand-Written Mail

Whenever you receive a hand-written letter as an adult, it’s usually followed by the phrase “shake it to see if it has any strange powder in it or something.” Plus, as a kid, mail is a lot like a hooker’s vagina: it probably won’t be opened unless there’s cash involved. There are only two reasons to send hand-written letters: to make you feel special, or to let you know you’re a f*cking asshole for parking your car in an inconvenient manner. And 95% of the time, your grandma is referring to the latter.

5. You Have to Wake Yourself Up On Time

Moms are Nature’s alarm clock. In fact, they’re way better than a man-made alarm clock that just drones on at the same tone periodically and annoys you into consciousness. A mom’s tone will change dramatically the third or fourth time she comes in to wake you up for school. Sometimes she’ll shake you, or even throw objects or liquids on you to get you out of bed. Sure, it’s annoying, but it works. As an adult, your man-made alarm clock is the only hope you have of getting to work on time. After several months with the same alarm clock, you’ll start to become immune to its sound, and you’ll begin to incorporate the droning beeps into your dreams, so that it’s easier to ignore. Like, you’ll be having a dream where you’re having awesome sex with Marisa Miller, and suddenly there will be a beeping in the distance. Marisa will be like, “Do you hear that beeping? It sounds like your alarm clock,” and you’ll be like, “Nah, it’s just a garbage truck backing up outside,” and then she’ll be like, “oh, okay, let’s just keep having awesome sex then.” Ultimately, it takes a great amount of will-power to get yourself out of that dream and off to work, and that just sucks.

6. You Choose to Wear Sweaters

When you’re a kid, wearing a sweater is like staying sober at your girlfriend’s family Christmas party: it’s incredibly uncomfortable and torturous, but ultimately it makes you much more presentable to the people around you. A kid would never willingly leave the house in a sweater, and even if your parents made you wear it to school, you’d have it off and in your backpack as soon as you rounded the corner on the way to the bus stop, no matter how cold it was outside. As adults, we’ve realized the benefits of a sweater: it hides unsightly coffee stains on an otherwise perfectly presentable shirt, and it also helps to conceal the awkward love-handles and other inexplicable bulges that come about as a result of age. To many adults, a sweater can be your greatest ally, just as long as it’s not the exact same sweater that you were forced into as a child.

7. You Worry About Not Getting a Boner

When you’re a kid, boners are like Starbucks: they can pop up anywhere, at any time, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. Just like an avalanche, they can be caused by something as small as a slight gust of wind. As a child, you live in constant fear of the boner. When you become an adult, boners become like that friend you had in college that you went out on a limb for and got a job at your office: you just have to hope that they show up when they’re supposed to and do an adequate job, because otherwise you’re going to look really, really bad.