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Yesterday was my birthday. I’m twenty-four now.
When you have a birthday, people ask if you feel older and I always say, “No, it’s just another day.” But really, I do feel old. Because I am old. This is the first time I’ve ever been in my mid-twenties.
Last year, on my twenty-third birthday, I made the argument that twenty-three should be included in the mid-twenties bracket. The way I organized the years, logically I think, was as follows:
20, 21, 22 = Early twenties
23, 24, 25, 26 = Mid-twenties
27, 28, 29 = Late twenties
There are ten twenty-something years, and if you divide them into three groups, you see that one group has to have four years. It doesn’t make any sense to put the big group at the end, just like it doesn’t make any sense to make a hamburger bun-bun-beef. Hamburgers should be bun-beef-bun.
When I raised this issue last year, nobody agreed with me, but that was fine because I really didn’t want to be in my mid-twenties. In your mid-twenties, you’re supposed to be going somewhere, or maybe even already there, which is scarier than the dream I had about Shannon Miller’s leg falling off during her vault routine.*
But really, as I stand here looking upon The Empty Highway that is my twenty-fourth year, I feel like I am going somewhere (but hopefully not Calgary), and that the first four years of my third decade were the On-Ramp to the Empty Highway.
Or actually, I don’t really have an Empty Highway in front of me. It’s more like an Empty Desert. But I’m behind the wheel of a Land Rover that’s capable of driving anywhere. I guess this means that years 20-23 can’t be the On-Ramp anymore. Not with the new desert metaphor. So my early twenties are now the Big Dune I had to climb before entering the Desert.
The Big Dune is important because it shapes the way you enter your early twenties. Even though my generation tends to “float,” as my grandfather says, through The Big Dune, I believe there’s such a thing as good floating.
But first, here’s an example of bad floating: You’re sailing in a boat and a hurricane comes and capsizes your boat so you put on a life jacket and hop in the emergency raft. But the storm is so bad that your raft capsizes, too, and you die.
Now here’s an example of good floating: The exact same scenario as above, but the hurricane passes and you spend several days adrift before you wake up one morning to the sound of a cruise ship blasting its horn. The ship’s crew hauls you aboard and it turns out that the passengers are young female Scandinavian refugees, all of whom are moving to Boston, and all of whom are excited about the idea of living in a new city, but who are also a little bit nervous and looking forward to making new friends and networking.
So as long as you float well, you’ll make it to twenty-four, The Empty Desert, heading in the right direction.
Here’s how I floated through The Big Dune (I now wish I hadn’t crossed the streams of a desert metaphor and an ocean metaphor, but I’m too lazy to re-write this, and hindsight’s 50/50, which I will explain later). I’ve included the best thing about the year, the worst thing about the year, and where and how I spent my birthday:
I was no longer a teenager.
Even though I was too young to drink, I was too old to wear cargo shorts. It’s a transition year.
I honestly don’t remember. Not because I was blacked out or anything, or maybe I was, but there’s just nothing memorable about a 20th birthday. I turned twenty right before my sophomore year of college, so this was around the time Dods and I drove to Michigan and the Jetta broke down twice – once in Michigan and once in London, Ontario where we stayed in a HoJo and drank Labatt’s while watching The Simpsons. Most of the trip, the Michigan part, was enjoyable, but the HoJo was kind of depressing. But I remember all of it. I just don’t remember my birthday.
Okay, fine, I can drink now.
Drinking in bars was way less fun than it used to be because I was supposed to be drinking in bars. There was no longer any danger or novelty involved. It was like invading a country: At first everything is exciting and new, full of shock and awe, but then you have to, like, rebuild the country, install a government, and deal with angry natives who keep whining about escalating cucumber prices. It gets old.
T’s on Comm. Ave in Boston. T’s is a Boston University bar, and I went there with Dods and two college friends, Jesse and Parker. We chose T’s because it was close to Dods’ apartment. Dods got really excited about my birthday, blacked out somewhere on the dance floor, and slapped a beer bottle out of some guy’s hand. Dods was mad at the guy because the guy had been presumptuous enough to tell us to stop dancing with his girlfriend. It was bullshit. If anyone should have been thrown out of the bar, it was the boyfriend.
No taxi driver would allow Dods in their car, so we made a pit stop at a McDonald’s, ate their last 4.5 McNuggets because that’s all the food they had left in the entire restaurant, and then Dods made us carry him the rest of the way back to his apartment. At one point we finally got him walking on his own again, but I took the opportunity to run at him from the middle of the street and shoulder check him through a bush. So we dragged him the rest of the way home.
The next day there was a mysterious discharge, the color of black beans and the consistency of refried beans, on Dods’ carpet. Dods had also pissed himself but didn’t seem to care. I was pretty banged up, too, but I was supposed to be. It was my twenty-first birthday. And twenty-first birthdays are for being stupid.
I was a college senior, which means that for the last time in my life, I had risen to the pinnacle of a hierarchical system specifically designed to propel someone like me from “not cool” to “cool” (relatively speaking) over four years. I can’t imagine this happens anywhere else. There’s no other comparable leap in coolness, especially over such a short period of time. Maybe in the 60s, when astronauts were very hip, if NASA had a four-year flight-training program, its graduating astronauts would have been like college seniors. But who knows how long the NASA training program was? Who even knows what NASA stands for? And who knows if it still exists? Unfortunately these are questions that we’ll never be able to answer.
I realized college would be over soon. I would have to get a job (kind of. Actually, I wouldn’t. But for a while everyone was worried about corporate recruiting and resume-dropping, so I panicked and got swept up in job fever, but then I was like, “Wait! I don’t want a job,” and everything was fine again). For many, senior year is when they realize that they can’t continue to watch reruns of Laguna Beach while farting on their roommate’s futon and waiting for the pizza guy to arrive for the rest of their life.
I was in Maine with my girlfriend and she gave me Red Sox tickets while wearing a Manny Ramirez t-shirt.
Every man in New England reading this column just got a boner.
But even though that birthday was awesome, it wasn’t an event. Twenty-two was when I stopped making a big deal about birthdays.
I was free. I’m sure some people feel like this year is the beginning of their enslavement to the employment system. But no professors were telling me to write 8-page papers, no coaches were telling me how many times I had to rep 450 on the bench press or 875 on the squat rack, and no freshmen co-eds were taking off their shirts just because they’d “gone wild.”
Apparently my glory days are behind me now, and sometimes my glasses tend to take on a rose-colored hue. A lot of people think hindsight’s 20/20, but it’s not. It’s 50/50. Because there’s a 50% chance that something happened, and there’s a 50% chance that it didn’t, and all decisions were essentially toss-ups.
I worked.
Those years got me to twenty-four, The Empty Desert, which I can only speculate will be something like this:
I’ll probably become modestly successful. I imagine book deals, movie deals, and totally unnecessary accoutrements like jewelry, yachts, Crystal, and rehab clinics.
There’s the possibility that some of my expectations won’t be met.
I started this column and worked again. Oh, and Pablo the Ecuadorian hairdresser gave me a haircut. Thanks, Pablo.
Okay, so maybe if yesterday was any indication, then the rest of the year won’t be as exciting as planned. But that’s the interesting thing about your mid-twenties – when you emerge on the other side, you might have collected a wife, a kid, a dog, even a min-van. Or you might still be floating.
Just make sure it’s a good float.
*If you’re wondering why I had a dream about Shannon Miller, I really couldn’t tell you. I think about the sport of gymnastics once a month, at most. I think about Shannon Miller maybe once a year, but probably less. Neither gymnastics nor Shay-Mill had crossed my mind in the weeks leading to the dream. It literally came out of nowhere. But what’s important here is that:
A) My brain for some reason credited Keri Strugg’s heroics in the ’96 Atlanta Games to Shannon Miller
B) Despite Miller’s obvious pain, and despite the ambulances, there was surprisingly little blood
And finally
C) The NBC announcers were in 100% agreement that her injury was the direct result of her recent weight gain. They showed an instant replay of her running toward the vault, and her uniform was like plastic wrap over a pile of beef stew. She was just too fat to vault.
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