BANISHMENT 6: My Youthful Indiscretion

There are some people I know who are exceptionally good at being adults. They’ve pretty much been advanced human beings since they were seven or eight when they started asking their parents for 401K investments rather than Beanie Babies.  They own houses by now. They own children. They own mustaches and family portraits from Olan Mills. The only truly adult thing I’ve owned so far is an ulcer from drinking too much coffee. 

Right now, I’m twenty-four years old. I will be twenty-five next month which means I’ve hit the tier where I can get discounted rates on car rentals and can check the 25-40 box on questionnaires, the second tier up (!). I will go to the DMV and get a new license. I will stop using the phrase, “That is so money.” I will also probably have to stop putting my name on Christmas presents my parents buy relatives.

Up until now, I have worried very little about what it means to be an adult. I have been self-employed or a workhorse at nonprofits, which means I probably could have saved more money if I spent the past five years working at McDonalds. When I’ve been upset, I’ve bought plane tickets rather than ice cream. I thought 401k referred to batting averages.

But this is the year everything changed. It started small. First, I began a gift-wrap storage box where I house things like bows and wrapping paper. This is the quintessential domestic move that all women must make. It means: Yes, from here on out I will ribbon and tassel all of my gifts and will not call my mother or Macys to do it for me. After the gift wrap box, I bought a coffee pot. And after the coffee pot, I bought silverware. And we’re not talking silverware from Target that you can throw in the lake at a picnic and laugh about later while purchasing more disposable silverware. It is the nice kind of silverware you can use at dinner parties and family reunions, if you’re into that sort of thing. It all matches. And is clean. And doesn’t look like you inherited it from your Uncle Barney’s fishing chest.

After the silverware came the dentist. I relinquished my childhood tooth man and found one of my own, an essential move in taking off the medical training wheels. Then after the dentist came the lasagna – the ability to cook a meal that does not go directly from box to microwave to mouth. It proved that I too, despite my taste buds limited experience, could hodgepodge a bunch of random edible items together and make them warm and tasty and better than physical contact with the opposite sex.

After the lasagna, came the furniture. The chair and couch that I did not buy off a dying relative or a shady man on Craiglist. I bought it from a store. A nice store that has floors as bright as Crest Whitening Strips. The furniture is classy and friendly and smells like new, expensive, investment fabric. But all of that is child’s play compared to what I did today.

This morning I Googled the letters “IRA” and I wasn’t searching for news on Ira Glass or the Irish Republican Army. I was looking up retirement funds.  I was trying to figure out the difference between Roth IRAs and Traditional IRAs since I didn’t learn this in college when I was reading about the drinking habits of fantastically emotional British writers. After serious investigation, I took a fancy to Roths and signed myself for a future on the British Isles by handing over a little green to ING. And small amount though it was, I sort of feel like baking myself a celebration cake that reads, in funfetti icing, Welcome to Adulthood!

I realize most of you reading this (if anyone actually does read this) are probably far ahead of me by now. You are the 401k over Beanie Baby conglomerate that makes my accomplishments of silverware and gift-wrap storage boxes nearly obsolete.

But today I will pretend like you don’t exist and that my pre-25 accomplishments are worth a Nobel Prize.  After all, I’m thinking Obama, giver that he is, might go halfsies with me.