I am not a doctor (nor do I play one on the internet), but I’m pretty sure that hormones make teenagers mentally unstable.

For example, this happened:  Two weeks ago my thirteen year old daughter and I were at the library to find her a book. She was ecstatic to find the books Everwild  and Everfound by her favorite author, Neal Shusterman.

“I didn’t know this was a trilogy. I’m so excited. Everlost was one of my favorite books. This is so awesome!”

As I said, that was two weeks ago. She has yet to pick up book number two, much less move on to book number three. I guess even the second and third installments in a trilogy of “one of her favorite books” by her very favorite author pale in comparison to the wonders of YouTube and Instagram.

Today is a school holiday. She doesn’t have any homework except, you know, studying for Monday tests that she “already knows everything” about. I walked into her room this morning and handed her Everwild. “I’d like you to read two chapters of this today.”

She responded most sassily, “I can’t read that, Mom. I don’t remember what Everlost was even about. I’ll be too confused.”

“But you picked this book. You were excited to get it. And you need to read a book for school. You need 15 AR points by next month and this book is 16 points.”

“I know, but I already told you. I’ll be too confused. I can’t read it.”

Two weeks ago she was giddy leaving the library with those two books in her hands. Today they’ll only cause confusion. Please explain to me how this makes any sort of sense.

Start investing in California grapes people, because the amount of wine I’m sure to be ingesting while living with this hormonal bundle of contrariness for the next five years is likely to make me single-handedly bring up their stock prices tenfold. (At least.)

*For those of you who know I’m supposed to be writing Just One Paragraph every day in September, I apologize – it was driving me insane to look at all this dialog bunched together. I just had to hit my tab key. I’ll try harder tomorrow.

*Book image from st0rmtrooper via Tumblr