I turned 21 this past weekend. Yes, bow before me, Penn is now my oyster: I can go to bars, order drinks and if there's anywhere to gamble on this campus, I can do that too. So I know you're dying to know: was it the most schwastey-faced, crunk, stupid drunk weekend of my young life? Well, if spending a half hour at Smoke's and then going home to watch Saturday Night Live qualifies as debaucherous, then yes, yes it was.
The truth is, I tried to keep my impending 21st birthday on the down low. It may be sacrilegious to admit this, but I wasn't even looking forward to it. For three years now, not being of legal age has been my go-to excuse for not reveling with the rest of Penn. "Oh man, I don't have a fake," I would say completely unconvincingly, looking forward to a quiet evening of gchat invisibility and West Wing DVDs. But now that I'm 21, I finally have to own up to my anti-social goodie-two-shoes tendencies: I'm the girl who chooses apple juice over wine and once made a dentist appointment during Fling. (And actually, if I'm being honest, it was an orthodontist appointment, and it was not particularly urgent.)
They say youth is wasted on the young, and I guess in my case, 21 is wasted on the 21. Sorry underclassmen - I'd give you my ID if I actually knew any of you and wasn't afraid of getting in trouble. I get that 21 holds a sort of mythical status among 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds. And there's even that crappy store where I used to shop in middle school, Forever 21, as if 21 is some sort of perfect, young but not too old/old but not too young age. Personally, I hate the idea of getting older and moving further and further towards adulthood. If I could be one age forever, I think I would pick 15: old enough to watch PG-13 movies, but not old enough to be responsible for so much as a learner's permit.
But there I go again, being a party pooper. I'm sure there are upsides to being 21. I can go to happy hours and hang out with other seniors and generally lord my age over younger people, all the while coming to terms with the fact that there are no more age-related milestones to look forward to: no excitement over turning 10 (double digits!) or 17 (driver's license!) or 21 (drinking!). just jobs and taxes and bills and the other murky things that constitute this "real world" we've heard so much about. But it's all life, and hey, life I'm looking forward to.
So I didn't vomit on myself or anyone else on my 21st birthday. I didn't start a fight with a stranger. But I also managed to avoid the existential crisis that easily could have accompanied growing another year older, and here's to that.
