To Be Young

The coming-of-age story is the most over-told, over-cliched storyforms of our time. Columbia, a town defined and endlessly reliant on its transient cash crop of students, bears witness to a never ending cascade of lust-apathy-redemption-growth plot lines. Perhaps it is simply monkey-pounding-a-typewriter phenomena, but some of these textless narratives still strike me.

MU Basketball's Kim English pulls at my Caulfield strings.

In the interest of full disclosure, English is a student of mine--kind of. I work at the University as a TA for a large lecture class that he is enrolled in. My job detail is mostly updating Blackboard and writing quizzes. We have never worked together one on one. The only correspondence between he and I was when he once asked to borrow my pencil for an exam, but I started following him on Twitter about a month ago once he rejoined the twitterverse after the team's season ended.

His 140-character bursts offer candid musings that construct a portrait mirroring his play on the hardcourt: young, promising, wide-eyed, while at other times rogue and frustrated. He is younger-brotherish. You root for him, seeing both his flaws and potential when tested. The struggles are real; they're small, angst-filled ones mostly--relatable because we've had moments like them ourselves.

Tonight I stumbled upon a few tweets in a row on my twitter feed that made me reflect on my own adolescence and young adulthood.

"Watchin these guys hoop infront of the dorms.. I just came to the realization that I'm not ready for a girl, bcuz of my 1 TRUE LOVE"

"It sux because Ive ended plenty of relationships, becuz sometimes I just wanna b alone, in thought, shooting or just dreaming about the game"

"http://yfrog.com/ccldlj"

We've watched and read the coming of age story ad nauseum, but it still gives us butterflies when a scene from one reminds us of our own.