On fun I’ve had

This is a little clarification about previous birthdays, because I realize that I came down a touch hard on them in my last post.

• I turned nineteen while I was in New Orleans to help with the Hurricane Katrina relief effort. That alone would not have made an awful birthday, because we were staying at a huge camp of hippies who condoned underage drinking and drug use and other things that I enjoyed exclusively at the time. My friends left to have dinner in the city and forgot to tell me. So that was somewhat of a slap in my smiling birthday face. My roommate and her friends presented me with a card and a bowl of cocoa puffs and sang to me. That was a pretty good lesson about friends.

• During my sophomore year, my friend threw a pretty sweet party and allowed me to tag along with her party. The dude I’d been dating at the beginning of the year started flirting or hooking up or doing something that I found offensive with some other girl I didn’t like, so that was pretty much game over that year. If I could go back to that party as twenty-four year-old Erin, I would put my cigarette out all over that porch and stomp back into that party to win a game of Flip Cup like it was absolutely no big deal (because I did do that), but you get wiser with age for a reason, I guess. Once again, I learned an important lesson about friends. And friends you choose to fuck.

• I turned twenty-one during my junior year, on the very last day of exams. I spent this year atoning for the sins of my sophomore year, so I overloaded and took difficult classes. I studied constantly and got all A’s in some of the hardest classes my college offered during winter term, so by the time my birthday rolled around, I was emotionally and physically exhausted. I had also spent the previous day in a Planned Parenthood, because you know, I wasn’t totally over being an idiot about the dudes I dated. I was a fairly habitual fake ID user, so twenty-one wasn’t really a big deal at any bar other than our campus bar, because that bar kept a log of our legal birthdays. This bar was closed on my birthday. One of my best friends took me to a bar and ordered some sort of flaming shot for me. I took it and promptly fell asleep on the bar. He woke me up and we walked back to campus to attend a party. At the party, many people were wearing neon wind suits, and one guest was wearing track pants and a floral blouse. One of my friends picked me up and spun me around while shouting, “You’re finally twenty-one!” At the end of a contentious game of beer pong, apparently an errant guest slapped the host of the party for a reason I can’t remember. If it’s not already clear, this is a party I wish I’d thrown. I was wearing gold Nike Dunks. There was no lesson here, other than that if you have too much fun and need to make up for it academically, you won’t have enough fun at some point.

So most definitely, they were all okay, and they have all provided me with mildly funny stories, but no, I didn’t have a particularly good time on any of those days, by fault of my own or otherwise.