My birthday was last week, I turned 22 years old. Patton Oswalt has a bit where he talks about how many birthdays, meaning the big deal, celebration, the whole shebang, a person should be allowed and what ages those birthdays are.
Needless to say, as I can’t do anything new and haven’t been alive for a whole ‘nother decade, my 22nd birthday wasn’t anything special. No crazy party, nothing super memorable other than going to Epcot the weekend before. It came and went and I thought nothing much of it.
But a couple days after my actual birthday, an acquantance was walking past and, whilst wishing me a happy belated birthday, asked, “How old are you, 21?” When I replied 22, he shouted “Holy shit!” and kept walking. But I had to stop and think about what just happened. See, I think of myself as a pretty young human being in the grand scheme of things. Considering that a lot of people are living to 70 these days, I figure I wouldn’t start being ‘old’ until I was at least 30. But is 21 it?
Am I old now?
OK, maybe the definition of old depends on your peers. I mean, when we were 6, someone who was 14 was old, and these days I think of 14 year olds as practically fetuses. But when I thought about it, I realized that even I thought that, all of a sudden, I was old. That the threshold in my head for old is somehow set at “greater than 21”.
And I got really, really scared.
For a moment, I felt compelled to plan out the rest of my life, to figure out where I’d like to live and work, and I got even more scared when I realized that there are just too many variables to account for to do that. All those thoughts of “When I grow up” suddenly applied to that very moment, all the promises to become more responsible and hard-working as an adult suddenly became things that I had to start doing tomorrow morning. Work out, eat right, go to bed early, suddenly I was living my entire life WRONG. I realized I don’t know how to do anything of value, no marketable skills, no knowledge of a subject that someone would pay me for, not even a set of recipes under my belt so that I could keep myself alive without eating at Wendy’s every night.
Of course, I eventually sat down, took a breath and thought about it. And I realized that the majority of the people I know probably feel the same way at this point in their lives. I mean, we’ve all been taken care of and provided for by our parents pretty much entirely up to now. Most of us aren’t ready to be ‘adults’, as much as we say we are, most of us can’t really cook beyond sticking things in the oven for 30 minutes and then taking them out, most of us are either fresh out of college or on our way to grad schools. We might be old, but that doesn’t mean that we have to go out and become the rulers of the world tomorrow.
On the flip side of that, I am going to spend a little more time in the kitchen. Getting my ass up early and doing some pushups couldn’t hurt, eating Taco Bell a little less often and starting my homework earlier than the night before it’s due is probably a good idea. I’m not saying that at 22 you need to have everything figured out and be on your way out the door.
But maybe we should realize the deadline for adulthood is closer than we all realize. And if we want to keep ourselves from moving back in with Mom and Dad at 33, a little practice for being ‘grown ups’ might not be a bad idea.
