In addition to purchasing air conditioning, Josh and I have purchased our first major appliances--a washer and dryer set. There's nothing like buying appliances to make you realize you're an adult, except maybe for calling repairmen to fix those appliances. Our dryer went belly-up before it finished its first load, so we had the repairman out to look at it. The problem turned out to be with the not-so-smart wiring of this house, but that's not the point. The point is that even though I'm approaching my mid-thirties and married, even though I just sold the first home I owned, even though I've been on my own for approaching 15 years, sometimes I'm struck by the fact that I'm an adult. Let me rephrase--I'm struck by the fact that I'm a grown-up. Grown-ups are different from adults in that an adult is someone who can vote and drink, even though he may live with his parents, or share a run-down apartment with three of his friends and subsist on pizza and sugary cereals. A grown-up is someone kids look at and put in the same class as their parents. He's a person with responsibilities, a person who eats vegetables even though his mother isn't looking and gets to bed at a reasonable hour. Adulthood comes with age, grownup-hood comes with knowledge. Perhaps I can best illustrate what I mean by recounting my very first "crap, I'm a grown-up" moment. It happened better than a decade ago already, while I was in college. I was living off-campus in a house with three other women--I was already very much an adult. One stormy day the tornado siren blew, and I was left wondering what to do. I had always been told to go to the basement during tornadoes, and we had a basement. But was it a real tornado, or just a warning? How serious of a situation was it? Up until that moment, I had always had a grown-up to tell me what to do. Many were the nights that Mom and Dad hauled us out of bed and into the basement to wait out a storm. In the dorms there was always an RA to tell us whether we should worry or if it was okay to ignore it. How did those people know what to do? In my mind, these are the situations that separate the grown-ups from the adults. It's like the old saying, anyone can be a father, but it takes a man to be a dad. Anyone can be an adult, but it takes something else to be a grown-up.