Booze-free B-day

I know what you did the night of your 21st birthday. You went to the bars and drank away every last inhibition, exchanged saliva with several members of both genders, woke up the next morning in an alleyway wearing nothing but a shoelace and a Cool Whip bikini and spent the whole next day on the phone begging your friends to take the pictures off of Facebook. Congratulations, and welcome to adulthood.\nIt’s a story I’ve been overhearing for years. On the night you turn that mystical age at which you become old enough to do absolutely anything except drive a rental car, you are expected to behave like the unleashed animal that you are. And you are expected to tell stories of it for years to come.\nWhile this obligation excites most college students, as an underclassman I was anticipating my 21st with a hint of dread. It felt like too much pressure. Would I even be capable of a night that could possibly compete with stories so rich with such uninhibited gluttony? What if for my birthday I just felt like ordering in Pizza Express or got a thirst that could only be quenched by the sugary goodness of a Shirley Temple? Or what if my birthday happened to fall on a night when I was in the middle of reading one of those really good books in which I literally can’t leave the house until I finish it? People expect stories of excess, and I would hate to let everyone down with my lameness.\nThe only logical escape from this kind of pressure was to study abroad in a country with a lower drinking age. There, I could slip beneath the radar and turn 21 quietly in a place where it didn’t matter and not tell my new friends that it was my birthday anyway. So for that relief, and possibly a few other reasons, I moved to Australia. \nThe 21st birthday is not a celebration of being alive for 21 years so much as it is about the reaching the legal drinking age. So for me, that was technically the day I arrived in Australia. On this magical day of my initiation, I arrived at my dorm, determined to stay awake past dinner to fight the jet lag, but I was asleep by 5 p.m. I awoke at midnight and confusedly stumbled out of my room and into the hallway, where I received an invitation to a party from a boy who endearingly nicknamed me “Sugar Tits.” I promptly stepped back inside my room, locked the door and fell asleep for 12 more hours. \nA month later, my actual 21st inevitably rolled around, and my friends took me to dinner at a Mexican restaurant where I was serenaded by a guy in a sombrero. Afterward, my friends and I blew bubbles in my dorm room. It might not have been the wildest night of my life, but no night that involves bubbles and a sombrero goes down as a failure in my book. It was everything I wanted.