Hezah, 25 for 5 more days

My best hetero life partner and I sometimes get the urge to wear our new clothes and go stand in a bar, trying to simultaneously blend in and stand out. Before this timeless ritual of bar lurking begins, we either decide to have big girl meals at nice adult restaurants ravage the remnants of old cereal, chips, and cheese, OR we eat nothing at all. The last option usually results in late nom noms from a truck. In fact, there are times that we purposely don’t eat a proper dinner in order to justify a late night truck binge. We DIDN’T have dinner, so it’s OK.

My best gf just turned 26 a couple months ago, and as I mentioned in my post yesterday, I’m about to bite that bullet in T-5 days. Perhaps it’s something about being over the twenties hump that makes us more aware of these people, more specifically menfolk, stumbling around the bar. We’ve now started to look around and question whether or not these fratastic boys and gals are younger than us. Once we determine they are in fact fetuses, we down our drinks and leave before that “old” feeling settles in too deep. 

Once we breathe a sigh of relief to have left pangs of post college nostalgia, we find a bar more suitable to our egos. We try and find men in their thirties and ask them when they graduated college, just so we can say, “oh wow, I was in seventh grade when you got your degree, you OLD person!!”

After that humiliation, they either offer us drinks or not. If the latter occurs, we buy our own drinks and take a lap before we commit to a location (Cher Horowitz is Jesus). We make an assessment of the caliber of people and settle into our own conversation making self-deprecating remarks about our bodies and our lives. Then we’ll realize that sad sack talk is unattractive and shift into topical discussions, gossip, and empowering conversation about how GREAT it is to be in out of our early twenties. 

This is the drunk philosophic poetic we wax in the corner of the bar:

Sure, it’s nice to finally make enough money to pay bills AND indulge in movies, clothes, and trips. The most amazing thing about getting over the hump is the feeling of settling into your life and losing many of the insecurities that have plagued you since high school. As you get older, you just stop caring, and you’ve made just enough mistakes to learn a couple lessons.

However, there is one thing I miss about my early twenties. I really miss going to a bar, or any public place for that matter, and feeling like the world is my oyster. I loved the empowering feeling of being one of the youngest people there. It’s interesting to feel insecure, nervous, yet confident at the same time. That’s how I used to feel when I went out. I was insecure due to a lack of life experience, yet still confident because as a recent college graduate, I still had all the opportunity in the world. I still had the possibility to free float, climb the corporate ladder, and have as many lovers as I wanted, and just pick up and leave at any moment. That unpredictability was so frightening and exciting at the same time.

Now, I have love, jobs, and friends that have all been found and lost again. I still have adventure, excitement, and opportunity ahead of me, but I think now I’m just a little more prepared to handle the speed bumps that accompany the risk. There are still plenty of people, men and women alike, who are still older than us, but really, we’re just a couple of old bitches in a bar.