age++

Today is my 21st birthday, a year I'm told by everyone is important but (and you know it's bad when I'm quoting the 1994 Street Fighter movie, and even then altering the quote slightly to be more accurate) "for me it was Thursday".  Maybe I'm just cynical but, on examination, I can tie no major significance in my life to this number, during the build up I decided to generate a list of the things that I am now able to do that I couldn't do before; that list is woefully short, constituting the fact that:

1. I can now legally purchase alcohol in the United States, this is tempered by the knowledge that I don't live in the US and have no plans to visit in the immediate future,
2. I can legally hire a car, redundant in that I already own one, and I'm not planning to travel anywhere that would require me to rent one.

Perhaps this is all a result of the fact that I couldn't sleep last night and became introspective, always a dangerous thing for me to do, but looking back I found more remembered significance in my eighteenth birthday, back then I felt that I had been given access to all the tools I needed to make my mark on the world; I could vote, I didn't have to keep a complicated list of which pubs Id'd and which didn't.  Even the earliest birthdays seem to be more important, despite the fact that all the major details of them have been smoothed from my mind, and I only have this sense of being little and protected and unique.

Maybe this really is what the significance of being 21, the knowledge that this really is it, maybe it's that I haven't had enough cake yet. Oh, and suggest that I wear a badge with "Hello I'm $age" today, and I will take great delight in flaying your mind with sarcasm.