Leave your own overheard convos in the comments.]

“Holy s***! What’s he doing?”

“He’s just playing video games.”

“He looks like he’s having a seizure! He looks possessed! I’ll never understand boys. They’re all like that. Possessed.”

A girl spills most of a box of cereal on her shirt:

“Oh god – I’m such a sand rat today!”

“Shakespeare? You know, he’s not bad. He’s had his moment in the sun. I think he needs to have his moment in the butt.”

A boy walks by a girl with a shaved head, then stops and does a double-take.

Boy: “Good evening, mister.“

Girl: (no reply)

Boy, after a beat: “I mean, what I’m saying is, you look like a boy.“

Girl: (no reply, walks away)

Boy: “God! Whatever!”

“You’ve got the whole room – the whole place is just covered in furniture! Like, you’ve got furniture everywhere, and you just have it in a pile. Like ‘what are we gonna do with this furniture.’ What was it, like, ‘I know! Let’s put a Christmas tree behind it, so nobody can ever see it!’ And didn’t someone steal that Christmas tree anyway? God, you guys are idiots.”

“Can I have an appletini? I’m at Applebees, and it’s my 21st birthday, and I want an appletini at Applebees.”

“Oh my god. She isn’t even drunk yet.”

“Okay. Got my career plan. I’ll be a motivational speaker. Companies will pay me so much money to wave my ass around on stage and make motorboat noises.”

“I hate applying to grad school. There are, like, four million degrees, and they all do something different, and if I f*** it up I’ll never have a job for the rest of my life. Can’t I just be a Ph. D. in ‘Hi, it’s nice to meet you’?”

“That’s why pandas can’t have sex! They have to wait around until someone in the world loves someone else enough, and then they just pop into existence!”

“I don’t want much for Christmas this year. I just want to be smarter.”

But I’m young. And the fact that I’m eating cereal right out of the box because I can’t afford milk is just one of those side effects of trying to find yourself…right?

At least that’s what I thought. Until I went back to school this weekend (for the first of many weddings) and realized that everyone had gone and grown up while I was searching for pennies to pay for my coffee in New York.

It isn’t that I’m stuck back in my college days. In fact, I did quite the opposite after graduating. I moved further away (literally and figuratively) than anyone from home. But when I went back I realized that while I was still trying to find myself they had already done just that. With steady jobs, big rocks on their fingers, wedding planning and bed times.

My already confused and heartbroken self had just encountered one thing I had never planned on: my friends, all 23 and 24, were acting old.

Now I’m not saying that they were stiffs, we all drank and danced and had a really good time at the wedding. Sh*t, they even played Chubby Bunny by the bonfire (yes, there was a bonfire). But at the end of the night, when we got back to our hotel room, everyone was tired and wanted to go to bed…. at midnight.

And I was stuck on the floor with half a beer and some pistachios wondering what had happened to the girls that used to stay up half the night goofing off and talking and laughing until we cried or peed our pants or both.

Maybe it was the fact that I felt such a chasm between us. Me, up in New York a predictable mess and trying to find out what I want for myself. And them, down South, having everything figured out.

But it isn’t so much the geography that separates us but the ideals of what we want. I suppose I don’t want to have everything figured out right now because years later I want to know that I struggled and I searched and I understood where I was going before I got there.

I am happy for them that they have it all together and I am happy for me that I am just now starting to fall apart.

I know that this life, this unpredictable, messy, emotional life I am trying to sort out is the one I am supposed to be living. So maybe I am not grown up yet. But I’m looking forward to the years it takes me to become the grown up I am meant to be.

Through blurry vision and a pounding head, I would reach for one “good-for-you” brand (for the base), and then proceed to find every sweet option available, filling my bowl to the brim with enough chemically altered sugar to keep me hopping for hours.

You see, when I was younger, my mom never let us have sweet cereal. We’d go with her to the grocery store, beg and plead for something with a cartoon character on it, and she’d simply shake her head, reach for the raisin bran, and state, “filling your mouth with sugar first thing in the morning means the dentist is going to have to pull your teeth.”

She could scare us for a little while, but once I grew up and realized eating sugary cereal doesn’t really dictate how many cavities you get drilled (I was the healthiest kid alive and still had about 3 of them), I vowed to find my way back the bobble-headed cartoons of my youth and their bounty of sweet.

So now, for your consideration, I present the Top 5 Sugary Cereals Of All Time (or at least my childhood):

Reeses’s Puffs: Even though it tasted nothing like the candy, this cereal was still the shit. Chocolate and peanut butter? With milk?! ALL IN ONE BOWL??! Who cared that the balls were hard and scratched up the top part of your mouth? Who cared that they got stale in a day? You were basically eating candy!!! For breakfast!!!

Fruit Loops: If you were smart enough to convince your parents that eating this cereal was actually good for you (“see Mom, FRUIT loops”), you soon found out how few spoonfuls it took to make your teeth chatter from sugar shock. Plus, watching your milk turn rainbow colors was like an LSD trip before you knew what LSD was.

Golden Grahams: Out of all the cereals, this one tasted more like it’s actual name than any of them. I often preferred to eat this cereal dry, finding milk just diluted the finely crafted sugar to cracker ratio.

Cookie Crisp: As a young child, the idea of eating cookies for breakfast blew my mind. Who was allowed to do such a thing? What Mom was so liberal that she let her kids dunk cookies in milk and call it a meal? One time in third grade, I actually met such a mom—she smoked a lot and asked us if we’d ever tasted whiskey before—but she always had a box of Cookie Crisp on top of her refrigerator that could be eaten at any time. Man, when she wasn’t screaming her neighbors or telling us about government conspiracies, she was totally cool.

Lucky Charms: At 24, I’m still this cereal’s bitch. I go back to it time and time again, even though I know there’s enough sugar inside those fake marshmallows to give me the shakes. What they should really do is just take out all the oat pieces (because I mean, seriously…no one eats those), and market this stuff as a synthetic sugar steroid.

Have I missed any of your favorites? What childhood cereals put you into a sugar coma?