Not fun being 21

Wednesday at midnight I will turn 21 and, besides reaching the legal drinking age, will – mathematically speaking – officially enter my 20s. I’ve both dreaded and anticipated this birthday, primarily because after Wednesday the only age-relative events I have to look forward to are social security checks and cutting a child out of my will. The rest of my birthdays have had their own tinge of uneasiness about them as well, and not because the number of candles on my cakes keeps going up (indeed, my family hasn’t increased the candles since I turned 10), but since I realized years ago the summer’s ephemeral nature.\nSummer officially begins Thursday, which means my birthday will come on the second longest day of the year. After the solstice, we’ll face shorter days and the march toward winter. So I find it difficult to look forward to a birthday that heralds the beginning of the end of a season I love and never lasts long enough.\nFor the past two summers, being outside was bound up in the misery of my summer job, where outdoor work was a terrible scourge I avoided at high costs, and by high costs I mean painting 18-feet-high walls without scaffolding. Now I can venture outside without any misgivings about impending heat stroke and actually like the weather. All the same, I still get the feeling I’m wasting time, despite my unusually high level of productivity.\nI rarely sit outside and do nothing these days, enjoying being 20 and not wearing sleeves. It’s too easy during a string of 90-degree days to forget we wore coats for more than six months.\nSimply, there’s a conflict between preparing for my life, i.e., ensuring I will be eating and just living when I graduate. But that’s the struggle of college, too. We want the grades and internships so we can end up with the lives we want. But we as college students need to go out at 1 a.m. on a Wednesday to buy pizza, to sit on a porch drinking wine way out of our means when we have Webwork due in two hours – all because college goes fast and life is definitely too short for Carla Rossi.\nSo rather than bemoan my existence basically being over because I only have a shortlist left for life’s big To-Dos of marriage, children and casket shopping (highly exciting plans), I say, don’t clean your room. Don’t do the dishes. Take a walk, look at the sky and grasp at the wonder of being alive. Learn to like the feel of being barefoot in grass again, get dirt under your nails, pick wild rhubarb and remember how surprisingly smart you were as a child for not eating it, play in the water, pick strawberries and remember how surprisingly smart you were as a child for eating the entire basket. Wear sundresses; send flowers, parcels, and sacrificial goats my direction for my birthday, and enjoy these last long days. \nThey’ll all be gone before you knew they were here.