I'm Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman

When I was a kid, I always had a looming suspicion that I was older than my birth certificate said. I was the same height and reading level as my older sister, which logically meant that I must be the same age as well. The following years held my hitting puberty before all of my classmates, buying my first bra before all of my friends, and thanks in part to my italian heritage, once again being the first to wax my eyebrows and co. From the very beginning I've always felt that my physical age was a year or two behind my internal age.
To this day, as a nineteen year old who, depending on the outfit, could pass for 25, my physical self often gets in the way of doing what my internal self loves most: drinking. My ID deficit never affects me when I go out to the fraternities or apartments, but whenever I want to flock to the bars with the mature crowd my physical self prevents that from happening. Thankfully, a bar on campus recently opened that's 18+ to enter and 21+ to drink. So this past week, my girlfriends and I decided that there was no better way to celebrate the last night of Mardi Gras than to hit up the bar in our festive attire of beads and beer goggles.
After a significant amount of pregaming, we stumbled our struts over to the 18+ bar. The atmosphere was vibing, the place was full of our peers and everyone was dripping in both beads and booze. My friends and I walked in, made our rounds, and after a brief lap around the place I arrived at the drunkenly determined decision that I was going to get a drink by whatever means necessary. I walked up to the bar bearing no ID and no money, only my most seductive eye contact. I set my gaze upon the bartender and unleashed a look that could have constituted sexual harassment. But by some metaphysical triumph, the bartender obediently gravitated over to me.
"What're you drinking?" He asked with a smile.
"Vodka tonic," I replied, still raping his soul with my eyes.
I watched as he made my drink, but before I could even slur out an excuse to free me from paying for it he just placed it on the bar and walked away. Stunned, I picked up the drink and turned to my friends. I couldn't believe my womanly powers were capable of waiving both currency and photo ID! My breasts are much more powerful than I thought, I internalized.
"What! How did you get that?!" My friends were jealous, which only made my success taste sweeter.
"The bartender just gave it to me!" Even saying it out loud I couldn't fully believe it.
"You're so lucky!"
"I know!!!" I felt on top of the world; I couldn't believe what I'd achieved with just a single look. I love being a woman.
I had a winner's thirst, so I took a sip of my vodka tonic to quench it. The taste of my drink was just as delicious as my victory. I swallowed my sip, and a second man immediately gravitated over to me, only this time it was a bouncer.
Shit! My heart dropped. No longer was I feeling sexy and confident.
"Do you have a wristband?" The bouncer didn't address me with the same grin the bartender had.
"I'm just holding it for a friend!" I tried to rape his soul but his eyes were deadened and mechanical.
"Let me see your ID." In lieu of a fake ID, I handed over my genuine 1992 license with the hope that he would be too distracted by my picture to look at my D.O.B.
He squinted his robotic eyes and shook his head. "Come with me," and with that he escorted me outside. "Don't let her back in," he said to the bouncer at the entrance, then went inside.
Within one minute I'd gone from feeling like the sexiest girl in the bar, to feeling like the biggest loser standing outside of the bar alone with the exception of a bouncer who wouldn't make nice despite my best efforts, all the while pathetically covered in sequins and beads.
"Pleeease let me back in, all of my friends are inside!" I didn't know whether he'd be more susceptible to crying or flirting.
"Can't do that," he said without even looking at me.
"Babyyy, pleaseee!" I guess I was taking the flirting route.
"Nope," he remained stone cold.
"Puh-leaseee, I promise I won't drink! Just let me back in, baby!"
He'd stopped answering me.
"Baby?"
Now he was just ignoring me.
"Fine! I'm gonna get raped walking home all alone and it'll be your fault!" Now I was angry, no one puts  this baby in a corner.
He just shook his head, still unswayed by my new angry approach. However, I wasn't done ranting.
"You don't even understand how stupid this is for your business! Do you even know how many drinks I would've gotten bought for me tonight?!" I was trying to put on the air that I was "the shit," but in actuality standing outside alone foolishly in my costume at the absolute mercy of this fat, aged bouncer, I had never been less of "the shit" in my entire life. My womanly powers had fleeted me, and I was left outside in shame, standing there like a little girl who'd been put in the time-out corner.
Absolutely defeated, I realized that this was a battle I wasn't going to win regardless of how seductive or angry I got. I turned away and walked myself home, stuck in the awkward limbo between ages 18 and 21.

Going Out With A Bang

Anybody who leaves their dorm room on the weekends (and by weekend I mean starting Thursday) knows what I'm talking about when I say there are two types of nights: good nights and bad nights. A bad night normally consists of either vomit, getting in trouble with Campus PD, seeing the person you like make out with someone else, or all of the above. A good night, however, is much more simple. To have a good night, something happens along the lines of: finally hooking up with the guy you've been texting for a while, making out with a good looking stranger, hooking up with anyone in front of someone you used to hook up with, or getting head without having to give head. When you wake up and your dehydrated brain remembers that one of these things happened, it sends a signal to your kidneys that their slow self-destruction was worth it. But as is illustrated by the examples above, hooking up with someone almost always guarantees a good night. Which arrives at my point: if you don't hook up with anyone, is it a bad night?

I'm going to take a stand and say that the reason we go out is to get some. If we wanted to spend time with our friends we'd be in our yoga pants and glasses watching Sex and the City, not in our platforms and high waisted skirts getting wasted. When we go out at night, we literally go out in hopes of a bang, which is why we feel dissatisfied when we don't end our night with a new tale to tell. Even when the hook up isn't good, the night is still successful when you have an interesting story to tell your friends over brunch the next morning. Even though we can't always remember who we talked to at whatever party we were at, we can always remember who we were making out with when we had to pretend to go "find our friend" so we could escape to the bathroom to vomit in the urinal rather than in their mouth. It is that type of battle story that defines our weekend, not the platonic chat with frat boy Bob about how our cousins went to the same boarding school in New Hampshire. No one wants to hear that shit over brunch, and friendly talking is no reason for enduring a hangover.

Don't Speak.

Sometimes it's better to drink so much that you have no memory of what happened the night before. That way you are able to endure your hangover in a state of ignorance-is-bliss. Unfortunately, I did not wake up in such a state of bliss; rather, I got drunk enough to spill all the thoughts occupying my mind, but not drunk enough to erase the action from my memory. Instead, I've spent my grueling hangover cringing, able to remember all my slurs verbatim. In all honesty, this is the way I spend most of my hangovers. I can't always be counted on to remember to take my ADD medicine, or to be at work on time, but you can always depend on me to lose my filter once I start drinking. Normally I'm able to get by without facing the repercussions of my words, however, last night I said too much to my circle of friends. The people I hang out with everyday. Even when I'm sober.
It all happened when my parents made the rare move of leaving me home alone this weekend, an opportunity I seized by inviting my friends over to daydrink. As enthusiastic as I was to get drunk and tan, I was equally eager to hook up with somebody. I hated the thought of being left in my unsupervised house full of possibilities only to not make the absolute most of it. I felt pressure to rise to the occasion and have someone to fool around with come night. That's when my eyes went straight to one of my good friends. I'd always had a somewhat secret crush on this friend and since he was single he became an ideal candidate.
With a goal in mind, I naturally began flirting. This is when things started going downhill. I was trying to be funny and flirty simultaneously which explains the following: my excessive sex jokes, my insisting that we make the afternoon "beach themed" in order to a) get everybody drunker than they intended, thanks to my blender, and b) give me a reason for wearing my bikini, and then finally doing my signature drunk-flirting move (actually, I don't even think it's clever enough to constitute as "flirting") of putting my fist in my mouth.
A million frozen drinks later the sun went down, and, still in my bikini and officially wasted, I was completely goal-oriented. According to my drunken logic, since the previous maneuvers hadn't accomplished anything it only made sense that I hadn't been obvious enough. I stupidly decided that I needed to be a more aggressive flirter. But much to my dismay, I'd apparently decided this too late.
"Hey, I think I'm gonna head home, I'm pretty wiped out from today. Thanks for having me, though." He moved towards my front door, and instinctively I tried to intercept.
Time to think fast, "No, you can't leave yet!"
"What, why not?"
"Because I'll be all alone!" This would have made sense if we hadn't just been drinking with all our friends in my kitchen.
"Haha, no you won't, the rest of the crew is still here!" He made moves towards the doorknob, causing me to lose the little composure I had.
"But you still can't leave!"
"I don't get it, why?"
"Because you're cute," Drunken prose was just dribbling out of my mouth. I'd wanted someone to fool around with, but instead I was just a drunken fool.
Before either of us had a chance to digest what I'd just word vomited on our conversation, the rest of our friends came into the entrance hall.
"Aw, dude are you leaving?"
He looked around, "Yeah, I'm gonna head home now."
As soon as it became clear that even after my drunken confession I'd been unable to reach my goal, my confidence deflated like the cheap and faulty gel-padded bras I used to wear in 7th grade that offered no support and could only be relied on to pop and seep gel through my shirt, making my awkwardly pubescent appearance even worse when I thought I'd already hit rock bottom with my lanky-yet-chubby frame, glasses, braces, and untameable eyebrow(s). Whereas earlier that day I was trying to be funny by putting my fist in my mouth, I'd now successfully gotten my big feet into my even bigger mouth.
"But I'll see you tomorrow?" he offered as he hugged me goodbye.
Yeah, you're right, I thought to myself. I will see you tomorrow. And the day after, and all the days following that until the end of summer when we go back off to college. And then I'll see you at Thanksgiving break.
Per usual, there was a silver-lining to my drunken misstep that provided a lesson learned: while a parent-less house seems like a goldmine of opportunity, it is key to remember that silence is golden.