The Idiotic Teenager Perspective

In my Frontiers of Brain Science class, we are discussing what happens to our cognitive abilities through adolescence, specifically the radical teen years, and I found an interesting parallel in how teenagers perceive the world and themselves with the narcissistic theme of this blog and Avenue Q. My professor discussed how teens become less bound to concrete reality and attracted to more absract thoughts, while simultaneously increasing their focus of their physical self (PUBERTY!). Also, it was mentioned that by the age of eleven or twelve, humans develop the awareness that other people have thoughts of their own unattached to the individual. All these sophisticated, scientific facts combined,  has our society littered with people assuming that everyone around them is thinking of their physical flaws or attributes. Of course, this period of conceit is short-term, but it does result in a behavior that exhibits teens testing their invulnerability due to their hightened ego. In other terms, I will walk on this tall ledge because I'm special, unique, and different unlike anyone else who will fall from this ledge. The characters of Avenue Q all seem to be stuck in this trade of thought, or at least trying to get it back. Princeton takes the risk of having sex with Lucy the Slut because he is sweet, charming, and has B.A. in English... so that makes him less vulnerable to STDs to the sleaze-bags that are on Lucy's regular cycle. There is a glorious "personal fable" we all write for ourselves in adolescence, and the occupants of Avenue Q still seem to be in the process of writing theirs. A lot of this probably still doesn't make sense, so ask me questions!