33.1

There's a time in a girl's life when she can't wait to get her period (I know, right?). Girls can't wait to have an age that required 2 digits to be told. 13 is the checkpoint.
A time when girls have this problem where their brains don't process age correctly so they think that 13 = 20 for some reason. So they fill their wardrobes with "mature" tops and skirts, they stuff their drawers with bras so padded they could be used as skydiving helmets. They start to spend their pocket money on mascara, eyeliner and lipgloss instead of the K-Mart carousel, gum and wishing fountains.

At the same time, boys can't wait to grow facial hair. They inspect their cheeks and chins religiously. Hoping, praying for the smallest trace of stubble. These prayers are usually misheard, and the boys are granted acne instead. They long for a car, they long for a girlfriend. They grow sick of their girlish frame, and want to be bigger, taller, older. They stop hanging around by the slide and start hanging around by the weight room. They start to look at their cowboy pajamas with detest, and they shun anything that might be classified under "doll".

I come into contact with these endangered specimens almost every day, and sometimes I don't know whether to laugh or cry. I want to laugh because they look so ridiculous but I want to cry because it's one of the many examples of this whole "grass is always greener" syndrome.

Kids can never wait to grow up. Never. Once you hit 13, you want to be 16. Once you hit 16 you want to hit 18, 19, 20. But everyone gets to the age that they wish they could be frozen in forever. Once you get past that age, birthdays are no longer looked forward to. They're feared. And the tables are turned.

People want to hold on to the very thing they wanted to skip: their youth.

I see kids who can't wait to grow up and I see adults who wish they wouldn't. Either way, I see impatient, anxious, unhappy people who grow to fear something as magical as a birthday.


A gloriously narcissistic day in which your accomplishment of inhaling and exhaling for a whole 365 days is celebrated with cake, ice cream, and free stuff from all of your relatives and friends.

I can only see a WIN/WIN here.

In short, I guess what this is all supposed to add up to is to calm down and eat your birthday cake. Something that comes and goes as consistently as age isn't something to get very worked up about. There are a million other things that are more worthy of your worries.