On Turning Twenty

It was my birthday a couple of weeks ago. I know; thank you, happy birthday to me. So, as my mother enjoys pointing out, I'm not a teenager anymore; now I'm two decades old. That's right, the big 2-0. This doesn't seem so old, considering I'm a junior and most of my friends are a year older than me, but the fact of the matter is I feel old. Not just as in a year older, but OLD, really old, like my grandparents.

My grandparents are the only people I know who have nothing better to talk about than their aches and pains, and now I'm the same way. I catch myself telling my friends how much my back hurts or my neck hurts or how I think they should install an elevator in my building because it is too hard to climb up four flights of stairs, and I think "Do I really have nothing else more interesting going on in my life than this?" The only good part about it is that now I have more to talk about with my grandparents. When we used to talk on the phone, our conversation would be filled with awkward silences, but now we compare the new vitamins we're trying and share health tips. Sometimes I think I have more in common with them than with my peers.

Last Wednesday, my friend called and wanted to go see a band at the Bistro. I almost didn't go because 10:30pm was too late for me to be out on a school night. You see, I like to be dressed and ready for bed by eleven. If I'm awake for Letterman and Leno, then something is wrong. True, it is often difficult to go to sleep so early considering most people our age stay up considerably later than that; most nights I find myself lying in bed, listening to my neighbors' music, thinking "Those rowdy kids, what a bunch of hooligans!" It scares me that I have the same thought patterns as a stereotypical senior citizen on a cheesy sitcom. And my senior citizen similarities don't even end there. I'm eating a lot earlier too now. I sit in Mather, eating my dinner at 5:15pm and think about how cool it will be when I'm 55 and will get half priced "golden age, golden hour" meals at Denny's and the Sizzler before 4:30pm.

But what really makes me feel old is my little brother. How can I possibly still consider myself young when people younger than me are getting old? In my mind, my brother will always be a five-year-old with a bowl haircut who I can trick into licking my shoes if I give him a penny. In reality though, he is seventeen and practically a man.

Every couple of months, I fly home to California and see the giant leaps he's made in both his physical and emotional development. He's taller than our father now and he can bench press as much as my high school boyfriend could. He's applying to colleges, even though it feels like I graduated last week. My most frightening revelation came this summer when I caught him coming home with a neck full of hickeys. Let me tell you, knowing your baby brother is getting more action than you are is the most humbling of all discoveries. I almost died. He tried to tell me they were bruises from his football pads, but unfortunately, I'm not as gullible as our mother.

Things like this traumatize me now. I was ready to hunt down the slut that did this to my poor, innocent brother, but then I remembered I used to do the same thing when I was his age. My ex-boyfriend used to tell his parents that the hickeys I gave him were wetsuit burns he got from surfing. Was it really that long ago? It had to have been if my brother is old enough to be a player now.

I think being twenty is going to suck. I don't get any of the advantages of being older, like being able to drink and boss people around, but I get all the crappy parts of getting older, like more responsibilities. I think my best possible course of action at this point is to live in denial. On the weekends, I can pretend to be twenty-one and then during the week I can pretend I'm still in high school (which shouldn't be hard considering I look like I'm fifteen.) That way, I can have the advantages of both age groups even though I'm at the in-between age.