21

This summer I've been working with a group of college interns at the "important cultural institution" where I'm temporarily employed. Yesterday they were gabbling excitedly about the upcoming 21st birthday of one of their ranks.

Which got me started trying to remember my own 21st birthday -- though I was quickly overcome with horror that I couldn't even remember my 30th birthday. Which was only a few months ago.

I think it involved a bottle of cheap chardonnay (bleah, how utterly 1990s) and going to see the much-anticipated Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. And probably Taco Bell. I ate probably a literal shit-ton of Taco Bell in those days.

Ah, to be 21. To stare down the long nose of your future and say yeah, I've got time for that. I'll do that later.

I wouldn't want my twenties back, to be honest. As I found myself saying recently to an old friend (hi Kathy!), my twenties were worse than adolescence. This totally blindsided me, too -- as a teenager wishing desperately for independence and freedom, I had never prepared for that possibility.