School is officially back in session, which means one thing to the childless:
Your social feed has been crammed full of first day of school pics. Feeling left out? Hey, you don’t need to sport a new “Paw Patrol” backpack and a Pinterest-y chalkboard sign to get in on the fun!
Here are a few milestones that you really should be commemorating, too.
Your first IKEA expedition
It seems like just yesterday you were satisfied with a mattress on the floor and your grandma’s old coffee-ringed coffee table. My, how you’ve grown! You rented a van and made it all the way to IKEA for a sweet new set of Hemnes dressers, and you’ve got a pic of yourself holding the instruction manual—sweating and half-drunk on $5 wine and looking for your misplaced hex key—to prove it!
Your first bottle of $20 wine
You deserve it after putting all that furniture together yourself, Property Sister.
Your first contested parking ticket
The immature version of you would just stuff all those city parking tickets into the glove compartment with the Bed, Bath & Beyond coupons from 2012 and hope they’d all be absorbed into the ether. The grown-up you knows three things: One, there were no no-parking signs anywhere near where you left your car last night; two, you saw every episode of “Franklin & Bash” (R.I.P.); and three, this ticket is as bullcrap as the cancellation of “Franklin & Bash.”
Snap a pic of your orange envelope with the “Contest by Mail” bubble proudly checked in the upper left-hand corner. Maybe a first day of law school is your future, Annalise Keating Jr.
A pre-“Hamilton” selfie
If you had a dollar for every selfie you saw of friends proudly showing off a “Hamilton” playbill from inside the Richard Rodgers Theatre in New York, you’d have enough to buy one ticket to the show’s upcoming Chicago run… and you did just that! “Hamilton” doesn’t open here until the end of the month, but don’t let that deter you from letting everyone know that it’s almost your shot to get *thisclose* to a thing created by demigod Lin-Manuel Miranda. Take a photo of yourself passionately making out with an 8×10 glossy of LMM.
Bonus points if you hire a professional photographer to shoot a full-on “engagement” session.
The first time you were anywhere near a boat/horse/Beyoncé/really sprinkly donut
Any of us can feel like Taylor Swift enjoying a long holiday weekend with the girls—as long as you have the right photogenic accessory. Be sure to capture the moment you share with any of the above mind-blowing things, and your friends whose lives have been overtaken by EpiPens, newfangled homework policies and carpools will be the ones feeling left out.
If all else fails, just re-enroll yourself into 10th grade, “Never Been Kissed”-style, and rock a white feathered getup for the most rufus first day of school picture ever.
Written by Liz Kozak (@LizKozak). A version of this post also appears on secondcity.com.
