-In less than ten short weeks, I will reach that most dreaded of milestones – my twenty-fifth birthday.  Soon, I will have been alive a full quarter-century.  Soon, I’ll be classified as “mid-twenties.”  Soon, (gasp!) I’m going to have to start taking responsibility for my actions.  In the words of my generation…dude, this sucks.  I think what’s ironic about the whole situation is that I used to be so mature for my age.  I was a precocious little kid.  I picked things up quickly in high school.  I had a good head on my shoulders in college.  Now, at the age of twenty-five, I’ve all of a sudden become immature for my age.  Great, at the rate this is going, by the time I’m thirty, I’ll be hitting puberty again.  Your twenty-fifth birthday is a time to take stock of your life.  It is a time to decide whether investing your money wisely or drinking until you vomit is appropriate behavior for someone of your advanced age.  In essence, twenty-five is the time to choose between growing up and throwing up.   This won’t be easy.

-First off, I’m not even sure that I qualify to be in my mid-twenties.  When I have dinner, I sit hunched over on a sofa bed in the halogen bulb-lit common room of my apartment eating take-out off of an IKEA coffee table while sipping grocery-store brand cola out of gas station souvenir glasses adorned with football helmets from teams that have since relocated.  I’m not even sure that qualifies as human.

-Before you turn twenty-one, the last thing you want is to get ID’d at the bar.  Once you turn twenty-one, you love getting ID’d at the bar.  Then you turn twenty-three and you start getting annoyed when you’re ID’d at the bar.  When you’re thirty, you again love getting ID’d at the bar.  At twenty-five, I don’t know if I should be insulted or flattered.  I guess the more important question is, why I am still going to the same bar?

-Twenty-five is an especially important milestone for my friends in grad school.  According to my friends, you don’t have to do any work at all in law school after your first year.  Then how come every time I call your cell phone, you pick up whispering in the library?  In a few months, my law school friends will have real, hard-core jobs for the first time in their lives.  Well, it’s been fun chilling with you guys for a while, see you in ten years!  Suckers.