It's so easy and forgiveable to be a 19-year old brat. You're considered an adult but with the kiddie effects of the 'teen' at the end of that snazzy number, you get away with adorable murder.
I'm very happy being 19. It's the best number my life has amounted for.
But from Friday onwards, I lose my final innocence tag as a teenage tearaway. I become one of the TWENTY-SOMETHINGS, as my friend Jamie says.
The twenty-something world is ghastly. In my mind's little cinema, my brain is like popcorn; it's bouncing off the walls of my head and it's messy to clean up. In fact, it'll take years.
When the clutter in the head begins to fill up the nooks and crannies and you're doing nothing but crying into your pillow every night and soaking it wet and black with your pissy mascara, you will know you're experiencing a mid-life crisis.
When you get sorted with your dream job and salary and you get pregnant and gotta leave it to birth a brat, your life is feckety-fecked. (Unless the baby is the dream, carry on as you are. EHH).
I'm afraid to acknowledge what my shoes are sunken into - student debts, an invisible mortgage and a gruelling word on a board afixed to a spring coil and makes that comical noise - BOING! - Marriage.
The last springer is the dinger. That rhymes, but with cruel conviction.
It means it's a good thing for parents, not always a good thing for you. I'll just stick myself on 'repeat' when I claim the other elder brother and sister still haven't been sorted, and how will me getting me married whilst I'm swagging with the paparazzi gonna help my rep? AH GAWSH, it's hard being Asian and a Gangsta...
But this year has been surprisingly different. I don't celebrate my birthday ever, and I have good reasons.
I tend to fight with everyone who was born in October. Don't question my precarious explanation.
Everybody I know is a October baby, so therefore my monthly bank balance is severely violently throttled down past the £100 overdraft. It's also the month of Halloween, so everybody freaks out over how-to-look-like-a-scary-slut parties and scare dares e.g eggs, flour and toilet roll that I personally would appreciate to USE MYSELF.
By this end of October, unfortunately but precisely on Halloween, the money I had or have left is almost non-existent.
It's different this year because something miraculously beautiful happened. I became unusually unaware of my birthday, and great things started to happen when I didn't think about that looming '20' rubber stamp due to be slammed on my forehead.
Firstly, the M.I.A gig. What a treat to myself! - I'd be partying at midnight into my birth date with the Sri Lankan songstress tantalising my ears. Then it got better.
I come come yesterday eager to meet my school friends who had come back home from university during the holiday break.
Now, when your friends sister tells you there's a fault in the electricity in the sitting room and that the mess in there is from her brother's birthday party last week, the little person in your head should switch on the 'OH I KNOW WHAT THIS IS' button to know there's a bunch of eager friends hissing laughter on the other side of the door with party poppers and a waxy cake.
I didn't quite take in anything - I had had such a long day at university, I was ultimately washed out and drained of energy to recognise the signs, but the life had been shocked into me by the sheer noise and excitement in their beaming faces; I was glad to be shook.
The present they'd all chipped in to get was another delightful twist. A Blackberry Curve 8520 on the O2 network! It was thoughtful on the part that I had previously moaned about the death-by-drown of my first BB via washing machine, and the other was that I was on Orange, thus not as accessible as they'd wanted me to be. For instance, free texts or free minutes to chat - O2 to O2.
The night then carried on as it originally would whenever we met - double apple sheesha, takeaway and some good doses of girl chat. It ended on a slightly odd note, when my sister drove off without me in the car when I requested a pick-up. She sheepishly returned, but it was the strangest best way to end a great night.
What really scares me of the TWENTY-SOMETHING realm is growing up. Best make the most of these last two days, then...
