year 21

I didn't get to fully hit on this last night but the greatest thing about being 21 is that you can finally drink. All of the best decisions of my life have happened after at least three shots. Note: The sarcasm is being applied rather heavily here. But, let's be honest, drinking is cool because it helps people to accept and love you for who you really are: a lush.

This was my senior year in college. When you're a senior in college you're ready to head out into world having learned everything that there is to know about it during the course of your undergraduate education. Plus, people are standing in lines to hire you because you've got a degree from a small liberal arts college. The business world is all abuzz about people graduating with Literature degrees. I turned down multiple offers to join lucrative banks and chose to go into child care instead because I'm a good person.

Being twenty one is great because everyone else around you is so happy that you're twenty one. It's your last birthday of any significance. And no, I don't include twenty five because of your ability to rent a car at a cheaper rate. It's not quite as exciting. Note: Obviously as I'm nearing thirty I realize that 25 is probably the most exciting for this very reason. Why? Because nothing makes me happier than saving money. Okay, Michigan football makes me happier, but that's it!

In this year you met your wife. You remember throwing a football in the quad with your friends and her asking you guys to stop. Little did you know that this early interaction was just her first attempt to 1) boss you around 2) throw out the proverbial no throwing the ball in the house! that you grew up with. Aside: I think that baseballs and basketballs should be routinely thrown about the house, and I'm going to encourage our unborn children to do it. In fact, I'll start right now. Hey, unborn children, toss me that soccer ball!

You remember almost breaking up with her after you'd been dating for a couple of weeks because she wasn't paying enough attention to you. Classic youngest child behavior, needing to be the center of attention.

Now, approaching thirty things have changed.
S still claims that acts of service is her love language. However, you've revised your love language and now claim that it is being left alone. You're fairly certain that being left alone was number six and just didn't make the cut because it's not as pithy as the five love languages.

You remember sitting on an old stone wall in the dark. The sky was blanketed by stars, and the ocean was beating its slow rhythm on the shore in front of you. But more than that you remember sitting in the backseat (don't worry the blog is rated G) on a drive home from a dance before either one of you were sure about anything. You remember reaching across the backseat of the car and gently massaging her shoulders. The memory of that touch, the surprise you felt in even doing it, give you goose bumps even now.

So, obviously the exciting thing about being twenty-one is the bar hopping but the downside is the imminent soul crushing doom of the working world. Did you know that Germans get six weeks of vacation each year? Yeah, I know, everybody knows that, but every time I hear it it pisses me off even more. And, further proof that I'm aging.


Positives-Drinking.

Negatives-Every bad decision that comes along with drinking.

Positive-Still in college.

Negatives-Leaving college soon.

Positive-You don't sit around in the middle of the night trying to calculate if you can afford to take six days off work for a vaction.

Negative-People always asking you what kind of a job you'll be getting with your lit. degree. To which you respond, "Job, what the heck's a job? Master's degree here I come!" No one is amused.

Positive-You're not paying rent yet. You don't know or don't care about words like grout, home equity, renter's insurance, transmission failure et al.

S: You looked good in that picture on your blog last night.
M: Thanks. I think it was the tan.
S: But do you know what I think? I think you look exactly the same right now.
M: I'm so happy that your eyesight is already failing.

Aside: My brother claims that I libeled him when claiming that he had the single of Strawberry Wine. In fact, he claims, and this is classic old people stuff, that he actually taped the song off the radio. That's right kids. Before you had the interwebs and iTunes you just had to wait for hours and hours with your finger poised over the radio in order to tape the song that you loved. I think the best music is the kind that's awkwardly taped from the radio with the D.J. talking over the back end of the song. It just doesn't get any better.

You listened to this song for the thousandth time fairly certain that it would always be your favorite. The sort of song that you would have as the years went by, ones that seemed to define you. Hell, maybe it still is your favorite song. So go ahead, even if you're at work and crank the volume on your computer speakers and remember what it was like to be twenty one. It's not such a bad thing.
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But this has not happened, not yet. The reticulate branches of the silk tree are raking gently along the white stucco walls of your childhood house. It is only your house in thought, in memory. You think of it still as home, despite the fact that your parents rented it for only four years, a small and quiet place in the sea of there memories. But time does not really exist for the young. You are aware, without knowing, that it contains multitudes. You know that an afternoon can be stretched out into an eternity, and that a hunt for a mosquito can last for a decade. Time is lazy when you are young, a thing that you can control. Some mornings, in the dead of winter, you lie on top of a warm heater, let the blanket unfurl around you, and find in this solitude, a piece of time that you want to hold forever. Your mother’s cold hands pull you up. “You’ll ruin the heat for the rest of the house that way,” she says. Time is a sleeping snake that remains coiled. And you find it suddenly, sitting at an old desk, your butt uncomfortably squished, the light coming through in diamond shapes through the lined windows as your teacher drones on about clocks while you wait for it be over.