I think the drinking age was 18 when I came of age but I've never been much of a drinker or a socialiser

Random: fun Studio Gibli children's clothing .

I'm so sorry Epic

And -t, gah! Sounds like too much work stress, although I'm glad that there's a will-work-for-now option. Commute is not a small thing, but nicer location may work out.

Oh and I said it on FB but happy birthday, Emmett!

My memory of my 21st is of going to A bar and getting A nice cocktail, and feeling very grow up, then deciding I maybe didn't want to get drunk and it was starting to get late anyway. I dunno, maybe there were 2 nice cocktails? That sounds more likely, doesn't it? Anyway I was really crap at sowing my wild oats.

On my 21st, my boyfriend and some friends took me to the scuzzy cowboy bar the locals preferred in my college town, where I had a beer and watched people get drunk to country music and one guy grabbed another's hand and slurred "Haven't seen you in forever, buddy, I'm gonna throw up on your boots." Thankfully, he didn't. Then we went to what passed for the fancy bar at the Holiday Inn, where my boyfriend bought an extremely overpriced small bottle of champagne.

I was home in DE for my 21st and my first legal drink was at a Bennigan's. I was mad because they didn't card me!

I went to a concert (Love&Rockets maybe?) in a venue that didn't serve alcohol on my 21st and was with an underage friend so a bar after the show wasn't an option. I hadn't discovered any drinks that I actually liked by that point in my life so it wasn't a big deal.

I was at an internship in Flagstaff, after a semester in Prague where I could drink legally. I honestly don't remember if I did anything. Probably bought some booze because I could again, but that was a weird, weird summer. I think it was cultureshock after being abroad.

Tonight is goodnight to the bleached out summer hair mess. Was freaking blond at the ends, even after a haircut. I hadn't dyed since early spring.

I mean, I remember fleeing Smiths' grocery once because the bread aisle overwhelmed me. I was phonetically sounding out signs, not able to recognize them. The S-P-A place confounded me for 3 weeks. My brain was working in a different place.

I do not have any memory of doing anything special for my 21st.

I sowed absolutely no oats of any sort on my 21st. I think a relative may have given me a bottle of champagne, but I'm fairly sure I never drank it. I was just generally spectacularly awful at misspending my youth.

Not unrelatedly, spent today hanging out with the super-cool parents of Matilda's closest non-Emmett male friend, a translucently pale and arty boy named Cassius who is her perpetual platonic Dickens Fair date (he went through a two-year phase of very consciously and deliberately dressing like the Artful Dodger).

Cash's parents are a translucently pale, gentle, gorgeously elegant woman who spent her youth in one of our whitest and dullest suburbs hopping on BART to sneak into punk shows in San Francisco (she dresses and carries herself so that you always somehow expect her to speak with a trace of a French or Italian accent, and her plain California voice is always a little startling), and a master electrician/former bike messenger/sometimes musician who once opened for the Talking Heads in Portland back when it was just a mill town by the river, at which concert the audience got very angry and threw eggs at his band, then got angrier and threw eggs at the Talking Heads. The worst part of it was that they weren't even good throws; decades later, he's less annoyed by the eggs than their shitty, inept throwing skills.

More than ever, I feel like I seriously did my teens and twenties wrong.