Me: Mom, do you have a pair of tongs?
Mom: No, I just move things around in the pan with two long knives.
Me: *under breath* Savage.

Milestones of maturity are tough to find in 21st century suburban America as 1/2 of the K-12 grades have a graduation and living with one’s parents into one’s late 20s is acceptable so I’ve taken to manufacturing mine.  In queue was having a dinner party where there were at least five guests, six courses, and some sort of served alcohol and I had all the checks in the appropriate boxes when I arrived at my mother’s house around 4:30 PM to begin prep work.  First up, I needed to make my crackers workable as they still weren’t properly crispy which was fixed by 15 minutes at around 325°F.  The finished cracker was something you could easily bite into but which, in the words of Teejay “could go into a block of hard cheese as if it were a dip”.  Still not worth $12, but I can cross “make bullet-proof crackers” off my bucket list.

The phase transitions were odd.  Normally, Teejay, Mike, Kyle and I have no compunction about pulling out a smartphone to answer some question to which no one had the immediate answer.  Something came up that was beyond our mutual ken and I think three of us reached for our phones but stopped ourselves.  After a few seconds of silence, Teejay pulled out his phone and hit wikipedia leaving us to ask “can he do that?”  Another area where the ice felt thin was conversation, as we never broached into a topic that I felt was meaningful, except when my mother returned home and I shared stories of proving that our uncle’s partner was a catalog model.  I also hadn’t planned on the need to recycle plates and Meghan’s furious towelmanship allowed bananas foster to be served without incident.  I also continued my trend of egregious food over-estimation and could have easily fed 10 people.  I had a page marked in my notebook titled “Next Time Get More Of” and the only entry was Snapple.

Everyone petered out, and I cleaned up as my mother asked me how the evening went.  Along every metric the answer was “fine” and I totaled up cost.  Faking adulthood is expensive but tasty.