For three days last week, my job as a substitute teacher was simple: Read Where the Wilds Things Are to second and fourth graders and show them a video of the book from about forty years ago. Before reading the book, I asked who wanted to see the new movie out in theaters. Most hands went up. When the video was finished, I asked again and all hands went up, much more emphatically this time. Truthfully, my hand should have gone up too. After reading the 10-sentence book six times, my eagerness to see the film had grown more and more.

I was jealous of the excitement I saw in the eyes of the kids I was subbing. It’s not like I was bitter about it and held it against them, although forcing them to write “I will not take my childhood for granted” 100 times did cross my mind. It’s no secret I’ve been trying to cling to my own childlike wonder lately. After all, I bought a year-round pass to Disneyland when I was living in Los Angeles and went six times in the few months I was there. (That isn’t excessive, right?)

Yes, I guess you could say I’ve been holding onto my childlike innocence like Rose holds onto the big wooden door at the end of Titanic. (Did she really have to push Jack’s head underwater when she found him dead?) I think part of the reason I do this is that I already do so many things that make me seem and feel like an old man. I’m completely out of touch with contemporary pop music; I use phrases like “contemporary pop music”; and I once asked a band about its “MySpace picture page” during an interview for BU Tonight.

But last week I confronted the kid in me by facing actual elementary school kids. Up until then, I’d only subbed high school and middle school, and let’s face it: I’m not very far removed from my own high school days to feel a disconnect with those students and middle school kids have about as much innocence as a Minnesota Viking on a party boat. (Honestly, there’s nothing worse than a kid between grades 5 and 8. I should know - no one was much worse than me.)

Working with 7 and 9 year-olds, however, my heart softened a little bit towards children. Okay…it softened a lot. It almost melted when I found the Marsh library’s collection of Hardy Boy books, the same books I read in third and fourth grade. When I was flipping through the pages of the same worn-down books I would take out every week more than a dozen years ago, I might as well have been playing spread at recess or doing my multiplication tables in class I felt so young.

Yesterday, I asked my fellow unemployed college graduate friend Gil (read his blog) if he felt we could still refer to ourselves as kids at 22 because he’d used the word casually in conversation. He thinks we should, pointing out that we both still live at home. Touche, Gil. But it seems ridiculous for two college graduates that are less than a month away from turning 23 should consider themselves kids. As much as reading Where the Wild Things Are six times and looking through Hardy Boys books made me feel like I was 9 again, I wasn’t. I’m not a kid. I’m a 22 year-old man facing real world problems that are only going to get more real and more numerous, but sometimes I certainly feel like a kid, whether it’s because I sleep in the same bed I’ve slept in since I was 3 or because I’m excited to see the same movie as a bunch of second graders.

I know it sounds whiny to complain about lost youth, especially when, at 22, I still have plenty of it left, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to go back in time, grab 8 year-old Kiel by his chubby cheeks, and tell him to stay there - stay as long as he can!

But since I can’t do that, I have until the end of February to make the most of my Disney pass.