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.

Not as wrongly and sad as I did.

Also, with my birthday being the day after Christmas, there wasn't much opportunity to celebrate my 18th in any adult fashion whatsoever.

So Pumpkin started nuzzling the speaker, after staring intently, every time Stacia L. Brown spoke. [link] I mean, I love her voice too, and the content, but Pumpkin *really* liked her voice.

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

I had perfect attendance in high school. Who *does* that?

Fun to hear how everybody celebrated their legal majority!

Talked to Emmett finally. He'd been asleep all day because the debauch began LAST night when he turned 21 at Midnight. So he'd been sleeping all day recovering from his hangover.

We both agreed that binge drinking is an overrated form of celebration.

Friends took me to a dive punk rock bar on my 21st, then to a "rising star" concert sponsored by a local radio station, with bands they thought might become something: Mother Love Bone, Soundgarden, and Jane's Addiction.

with bands they thought might become something: Mother Love Bone, Soundgarden, and Jane's Addiction.

They thought right!