Everyone hates teenagers, except teenagers

I'm a person who can remember everything. Actually a more accurate statement is I have an incredible long term memory and a terrible short term memory. I can remember Danny Hulton's journal entries in grade one but I can't remember to buy bread crumbs to make dinner on my way home from work. When you're in primary school, your life is at it's most current stage. When you're thirteen and under you don't have the ability to reminisce yet, you talk about what happened that day and then you move on. When you enter high school you reminisce about primary school and by grade 11 you're reminiscing about all the times your got drunk at parties and threw stuff off balconies the previous two years. When you enter university you reminisce about dumb shit you did when you were a teenager and amazing stories about Jeremy Gray doing a back flip off a hotel into a boat harbour. Your twenties are a blur and when you hit thirty you reminisce about everything that seemed like it happened a year ago when in actuality it happened five years ago. This makes your start realizing that pictures of parties you were at when you were seventeen were a mind melting thirteen years ago. When I was fourteen, eighteen year olds seemed like they were thirty and the age of twenty-three seemed unfathomable. I had no idea what being twenty three meant at all. Now I'm thirty and I look at twenty year olds like they're thirteen. I wasn't mature when I was twenty, I was mature enough to live on my own but I ate chips, pancakes and drank 950 cans of Steeler beer everyday. Now I've become something I never thought I would be: an ageist. I look down upon 20 year olds and teenagers because I know more than them about life than they do. I can't have a conversation with them because everything they are experiencing I already experienced ten years ago. Everyone hates teenagers except teenagers themselves. When you're in your teens you want respect that you don't deserve and then you grow up you realize why you didn't get it. Looking beyond that I can relate to twenty year olds because I loved being twenty, I had a job with the government, made a lot of money, and drank on patios all summer.