I Turned Twenty and All I Got Was This Quarter-Life Crisis!

I turned twenty this week. These are all the old person things I do now.

1. Collect candles. I am obsessed with candles and I can’t stop buying them. For me, a carefully curated candle collection indicates adulthood. The women of my family feel about Yankee Candle the way Canadians feel about maple syrup (polish pottery also endears itself in similar ways).  When my aunt Kris passed away, my mom opened her bathroom closet and found shelves upon shelves full of unburned Yankee Candles. I am not yet at this level.
2. Watch workout videos. I always remember my mom working out along with a video on PBS every morning before work. Now I watch pilates online and flop around on my carpet daily. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
3. Contemplate my own mortality. I always hated how characters in books going through a “midlife crisis” would seem so one-dimensional, like caricatures of aging. However, I experienced a pretty severe quarter-life crisis once I realized that in this decade I would become a full and bonafide adult. This is even the last year I can apply for youthful offender status if I commit a crime. People would ask me if I was excited to turn twenty and I would respond with such gems as, “Death is imminent,” “Our best days are behind us,” or the vivid and enticing, “We are all rotting from the inside out every day.” I am a joy to be around.
4. Talk on the phone for longer than an hour. When I was little,  Saturday mornings were my mom’s favorite time to call her mother and sister and talk for what seemed like eternity while I sweetly annoyed the daylights out of her. I  now talk to my mom for at least an hour twice a week.
5. Check my email and Facebook (two inarguably elderly-centered forms of communication) regularly. This has been going on for a while now but that doesn’t make it ok.
6. Use the restroom hourly. I used to be known as “the camel” for my prowess in never using the restroom on road trips. I am sad to see this stage of my life come to an end. More and more this post is turning into “How I Am Becoming My Mother in Six Easy Steps (With Bonus Existentialism!)”
7. Drink one glass of wine and pass out at 11 pm without ever leaving the house. Total mom move.

Hopefully next week I will do a review of the StitchFix I got for my birthday, pending my roommate taking a series of photos of me wearing different outfits, an activity I know she lives for. If not, I will draw the outfits on MS Paint and do it anyway.

With love and with one toe in the grave,

Megan