The Final Coming-of-Age

Today is my birthday. I have now been 21 for two hours.

Tonight, my roommate's boyfriend is going to cook everyone dinner. Then, I am off to Whelans for dancing and what I'm told will be free drinks all night, because that's what friends do. Hopefully, the people in the Village (the bar next door) will keep their cool and not start any fires. This happened once, on a very rainy and cold night in March, and led to adventure, intrigue, and a broken staircase. As much as I enjoyed that, however, it will be nice to not have to traverse the freezing streets of Dublin right before the sun rises. Tonight, I am going to try very hard not to get shitfaced like every other newly-minted 21-year-old, but since my tolerance is next to non-existent, my plan may be foiled. I'm anticipating doing things that will continue to add fuel to the fire that is my cinematic life, a big burning heap of moral ambiguity, but, more importantly, an exercise in "looking out for number one" and furthering my own personal happiness. And I'm anticipating having fun, because when planning these shenanigans, people asked what I wanted to do, and that was the only thing I could decide on: to have fun. So it shall be.

It's surreal, to "come of age" in another country. I can't explain it, but I'm sure it'll feel even more surreal later on. It's also strange to think that once I return to the States, I will finally be able to do things I've been waiting at least eleven years to do. As someone who's always had older friends (we're talking ten to twenty to even thirty years older), being unable to go to bars and such has put a bit of a damper on my social life. Imagine not being able to participate in wedding festivities simply because of your age. Imagine not being able to attend theatre fundraisers, ones of indescribable importance to you. Imagine having to turn down invitations to go to club nights because you knew you'd get carded. Last summer, when I lived in New York, the idea of getting a fake ID was a constant temptation. It meant freedom. It meant fun. But places have started cracking down. There's new technology to detect fakes. To put down my hard-earned money, only to have the thing taken away from me within a week (like a girl I knew)--it didn't seem like a great risk to take. I'd gotten so far. I'd wait it out. And now here I am, completely free of a driver's license that identifies me as a 23-year-old from Kansas. In Ireland, of course, it makes little difference, but I can guarantee it'll feel so good once I'm back in the land of my people.

To kick off my day of days, I played two games of Scrabble. I've been playing like mad, persevering despite constant losses (this is probably indicative of why I shouldn't gamble), and while I lost the first game, I won the second, bumping my user rating up exponentially. Also, I played a 7-letter word on a triple-word score and finished the game with 458 points (leading by nearly 200). Some people play pool, some people play Monopoly, and me...well, me, I play Scrabble. Once a geek, always a geek. Happy birthday to me.