A solid fourth of my Spice-Girls-Era diaries is filled with food porn: hot sessions with Kit Kat in the girl’s locker room, sexually frustrating make out binges with Bubble Tape and steamy afternoons spent spooning a large, sweaty bowl of hot chocolate. After I die, those three Jesus Loves Me diaries will survive me for years to come, leaving my offspring generations of discomfort, knowing that Great Great Great GranShan, the matriarch of their race of enormous gingers, was a checkout-lane-item fetishist.

And after a century of letting them sweat it for my entertainment, I’d send down (assuming God grades us on a curve) or up (if not) a talking dove, house plant or mini-horse to explain that I actually didn’t dream of playing seven minutes in Heaven with the candy aisle. Rather, I’d hoped to spend the afternoon locked in the closet with Kenny Rackle (a.k.a. Kit Kat … break me off a piece of that!), Blake Rodgers (a.k.a. Bubble Tape … six feet of man candy!) and … and hot chocolate. I actually meant hot chocolate that time.

Kenny and Blake were the Gods of their respective high school cults. Kenny “Kit Kat,” a starving artist that I couldn’t wait to pick my teeth with, wrote award winning poems, discussed Bob Dylan with my yuppie/beatnik of an English teacher, and shook his perfectly disheveled hair teasingly in my direction, all accomplished with the nutritional intake of carrots and paint chips.

Blake “Bubble Tape” was a three-sport dreamboat who couldn’t spell his area code, but earned straight As in charm and biceps. They inspired more man crushes than A Rod and more panty dropping than an OBGYN conference, and everyone, from principal to pre-pubes referred to each of them as “the man.”

And I, ever the huntress of anything that could make me even a little bit cool, slipped into the same sputtering, sweating, gleaking frenzy when confronted with Kenny and Blake, as when confronted with their holiest of affecting nicknames: “The Man.”

When the term first spread around my grammar school like lice after spring break, I studied this moniker of monikers in hopes that, if I could only figure out where the head and arms go, I could at slip into “The Man” onesie. Admittedly, I hit a few road bumps along the way to becoming The Man, including a brief problem with article confusion (“a man”/”the man” distinction = very important in this case) and a subsequent three years of Boy Scouts.

In eighth grade, I discovered “The Man” was an equal opportunity epithet with no gender biases. That’s right, girls: We innies are as much in the running for becoming The Man as our outtie counterparts. As my lady homies and I skipped homeroom, high-fived over every forced “balls” reference in Health and Gym, and painted our fingernails almost black, I had a fleeting taste of what it meant to be The Man. My collared shirt dangled untucked in the face of my dress-code-Nazi of a headmaster as if to say, “I’m 14 and dangerous. Look out, tomorrow I might have rivets on my chinos.”

But, like a janitor in protest, high school trampled on my blossoming flower of The Manhood. Suddenly, my once-glorifying traits were lost under the sea of much cooler, much more hardcore upperclassmen. My semi-black nail polish and Blink 182 CDs were no match for Lara’s posse of tattooed noise-rock listeners. My semi untucked JCrew shirt gave way to girls protesting the objectifying nature of the dress code by showing up to school looking like Pam Anderson fell into a shredder. And I silently took down the hundreds of posters that had once turned my room into a Mecca for the devoted followers of the Backstreet Boys.

But, after a year of bringing lawn chairs and inflatable kiddie pools to school in an ultimate statement of senioritis, I entered college with a renewed sense of being The Man. I had my own mini-fridge, no curfew and the freedom to high five strangers with our tongues on beer-sticky dance floors. Like, every senior knew my name, I knew what it meant to be sexiled, and I even bought a jacket on sale that looked a lot like a North Face.

You know that guy at the bar who head bangs to “Piano Man,” shakes it way too close to his guy friends when no one else is dancing, tries to fist pound the bartender, and buys drinks for cougars when no one else will accept them? The guy who thinks the spotlight is on him, the guy whose girlfriend just wants to go home, the guy who knows he is the man of the night? I was that guy. For a brief moment freshman year, we were all that guy.

But seniors, we’ve come a long, long way. We’ve mellowed out, found our niche, and stopped living college like it was an ABC comedy series. I even venture to say we’ve each become The Man of our perspective endeavors. Regardless of whether you’re a bar star or rock star, whether you always sink the last shot in ’Rut or in the game, whether you’re a hot mess or a HOTelie, if you’ve left your room in four years, you’ve made some sort of name for yourself.

We are trout in the goldfish bowl of our niche. We live in single bedroom apartments and blast our indie fresh underground rap through our sweet sound system consisting of laptop speakers and a floor base. We can name at least four different Sam Adams products, and we ne’er resort to using such plain words as “drunk,” as we can rattle off 20 euphemisms whose remote or throwback usage serves as yet another sign of our collegiate mastery.

And yet, next year, we’ll be poured into the ocean of the real world, and find ourselves at the bottom of The Man food chain. And, suddenly, we’ll still be living in single bedroom apartments and blasting our underground rap through our laptop speakers and floor base. We’ll be naming only four different Sam Adams products, and we’ll be suppressing the urge to tell our boss we were “blitzed,” “twisted” or “faced” this weekend.

Take heart in our proven ability to rise up the ranks of The Manhood; but, until then, let’s just resist the urge to fist pound him, too.