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I never really experienced rites of passage that people typically do throughout childhood and adolescence. I had an unusual upbringing in the sense that I was consistently uprooted due to a number of overseas moves, which led to my general lack of knowledge/interest about these “traditional” rites of passage.

Here are a handful high school rites of passages I never experienced:

• Graduating from primary/middle school in order to enter high school
  I left my first middle school in the US at the end of sixth grade, which meant I missed out on the eighth grade graduation. At my new school in Australia, students graduated from primary school in year six and not year seven. I transferred to my Australian school at the beginning of year seven, so I had just missed out on graduation. The first time I ever graduated from anything was when I completed high school!
• Sweet sixteen birthday party
  My sixteenth birthday was a quiet and lonely affair. I had just moved to Chicago from Australia, and I didn’t know anyone in Chicago besides my immediate family. My sixteenth birthday “party” was comprised of myself, my mother, my brother, and a chocolate cake. It was nice, but definitely not the sweet sixteen bash many kids expect on their sixteenth birthdays.
• Driver’s license at sixteen
  I didn’t get my driver’s license at sixteen. Honestly, I was never bothered by this, I managed just fine without one. Besides, I think sixteen is too young to drive; the thought of the sixteen year olds I know on the roads scares me.
• Getting my first car
  This ties in with the whole driver’s license thing, for obvious reasons. However, I also have zero interest in getting a car of my own. The area I live in has good public transportation, and where I go to for college has excellent public transport. Ideally I’d like to live in a city like London, Paris, or Hong Kong after I graduate from college, all of which have phenomenal public transport and there is no need for a car. I don’t want to deal with car payments, insurance, maintenance, gas… it’s all money I’d rather not spend on something I don’t see as needing.
• Getting my first job
  Unlike most teenagers, I didn’t get my first job in high school. I was on a student visa in Australia so I legally was not allowed to work, and then my final two years of high school took so much time and energy out of me that I didn’t even want to think about a job. (I don’t count babysitting gigs as an “official” job.) I did get a job at college though, it just took me a little longer than most of my classmates to get the ball rolling on the job front.

Chicagoan roads are infamous for awful, horrible potholes. This particular one was so bad they had to fence off the area around it as a safety precaution. Potholes are never good to drive on cause they can take out your tire, but when the pothole is big and deep enough to store a kitchen sink inside it, there’s a serious problem!

I mentioned needing to get my driver’s permit in early May, in order for me to take my driving lessons and start the process of getting my driver’s license. Well, I got the permit in mid-May, and I finished up my initial hours with my driving instructor yesterday. Hopefully I can get my license this summer, as that was the plan when I was booking my driving lessons for this month!

At 18, it’s unusual for me to not have my license when the driving age is 16/17 in the US. US public transport is infamous for being crappy and/or non-existent, so countless teens go to the DMV on their 16th birthdays to get their driver’s licenses. However, I moved to the US from Australia right before I turned 16, and there was so much going on in my life that learning how to drive in addition to dealing with everything else really wasn’t an option. Plus, Americans drive on the right side of the road and Australians drive on the left, and I had to deal with getting used to the change in driving direction too!

I turned 16 the first summer I was in Chicago, so the tentative plan for my license was to get it the next summer, the summer of 2007. However, that summer was when I went to France on my exchange trip, so then I thought I would get my license the next year. Yet I was traveling again in the summer of 2008, this time to China. By then, I knew the earliest I could get my license was the summer of 2009, because I was living away from home in the 2008-2009 academic year without any access to a car, so there was no way I could learn how to drive during the school year.

Now that the summer of 2009 is here, I am well on my way to getting my license. The initial hours are done, so now I just need to practice driving lots before I go and take the driver’s license test. Driving is not as hard as I thought it would be, which is a relief, and I know the driving exam is not hard as I did a practice run through it twice with my driving instructor. However, people on the road are idiots! Now that I know the rules of the road, it’s alarming to see how many people blatantly disregard them and put everyone’s safety in jeopardy!