When You’re Twentysomething
- You become cognizant of where money comes from. You start referring to it as Blood Money or as I like to call it, Shattered Dreams Money.
- Organic, gluten-free, and fat-free consume your shopping list. You’re all about the respect-your-body-as-a-temple thing until it’s 2am, you’re drunk and hungry and ohmygod is that a McDonald’s?! HELLO SUPERSIZED FRENCH FRIES AND SWEET ICED TEA!
- You buy gas in 5/10/20 dollar increments, depending on how much money’s in your wallet when the gas light starts flipping a shit and you have to frantically googlemap an Arco.
- Yet your closet is filled with clothes from that half-off sale, which really only means you bought twice the stuff.
- Prince William marries, and the childhood dream dies.
- You get tired at 1am, because you’re used to sleeping by 11pm and waking up at 7. Your college friends mock you for being old. Lucky bastards. You’d argue, but your eyes start rolling in the back of your head and you start doz… What? Where were you? Oh, yeah, sleep. It is good. By this point, your body can’t handle another Adderall-fueled all-nighter.
- Dating becomes more serious. Is one month a proper amount of time to wait before casually showing your boyfriend pictures of engagement rings?
- You put off paying the bills until they threaten to shut off service. It’s not a game, my friend, they will literally do it.
- With that said, you have real responsibility now. You’re still young enough to waive off mistakes as inexperience, but you’d better own up. CONFESSION TIME: I totally broke the coffee machine at work.
- You learn to cook more than microwaveable Chef Boyardee. You also memorize the menu of every restaurant in deliverable range, their minimum order price, and the names of their cute delivery boys.
- Sleeping in becomes the closest thing to heaven.
- Friendships solidify, because you no longer make friends out of convenience. It actually gets pretty fucking inconvenient to see people who live 40 miles away. In LA traffic, this might as well be the Oregon Trail, so that shit has got to be genuine. Unless you like driving at 5mph and burning your Shattered Dreams Money on gas.
- Time goes by way too quickly. Sometimes you have incredible moments of euphoria when such amazing things happen that you black out. Then you wake up with a hangover. Or a bunch of shopping bags from stores you don’t remember walking into.
- Weddings used to mean eternal happiness and the chance to sneak booze at the grown-up table. Now they signify more debt, golden handcuffs, and bad reality TV.
- Despite slaving away 40 hours a week, you’re still broke. All. The. Time. This may or may not be attributable to your shopping habit, overpriced apartment in the middle of the city rather than its outskirts (where you would get shot fetching the mail), or buying everyone drinks at the bar. Shot shot shot shot! This round’s on me! Let’s not look at the credit card bill next month!
- Your parents start nagging you to settle down with a nice doctor/lawyer/accountant. Right. (Note: Starving artist, come at me. Bonus points if your electricity also got shut down, compelling you to write a piece on how we are all just really living in the dark.)
- You strip away the trivialities of college to recognize what’s important: your health, friends, family, and youth. Now, go get blacked-out drunk with strangers and make decisions you’ll regret in the morning.
-K
