Soon I'll be Senile.

Today, I turn 20. All I can think to myself is that I'm getting horribly old and that I've had "Teen Idle" by Marina and the Diamonds playing on repeat for the past week and a half to try and comfort myself with the fact that I am no longer an adolescent. For most people it seems, birthdays are a wonderful occasion full of cake and ice cream and presents and well-wishing for the year ahead. However, I just become more and more morose and melancholy with each passing birthday. I do not want to get old; it's that simple.

I dread the fact that I'm now 20. What scares me even more is the fact that one day I'll be 30. I am horribly terrified of being 30. But for some strange reason, I am completely fine with being 40, 50, even 80 years old. Maybe I'm just afraid of wasting my youth doing things that older people are meant to be doing, like paying bills. Young people are supposed to be recklessly driving their motorcycles off into the sunset abroad while absorbing culture and eating strange foods while sipping LSD from their wineglasses through a straw. Or, at least that's what I've come to believe I'm supposed to be doing, instead of sitting here in my dorm watching The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and eating a whole bag of French Onion Sunchips by myself. I couldn't afford to buy myself a cake.

The problem with me, I think, is that I am terrified that I am never going to get to do what I really want to do. I wanted desperately, sickeningly so, to study abroad in London at the University of Westminster. But seeing as how I am a broke-ass college student barely capable of buying myself a Coca-Cola, I don't see how I would have been able to afford $11,000 worth of grandeur. It'd probably cost me that much to even go on my own time. There's a $2,000 flight, a $500 hotel, probably about $300 for food, $200 for travelling expenses like a taxi or the Underground or the bus (not to mention I'd want to take that underground train that goes to Paris and perhaps spend a weekend in Germany), and about $300 for odds and ends and emergencies. I am so worried that I am never ever going to be able to afford anything like this and it scares the living daylights out of me.

Or maybe I feel this way because nobody cares about being 20. Nothing grand happens when you turn 20, you just sit there and wonder if anybody notices that you're developing wrinkles. It is a strange in-between age, like being 19 was. You're past the excitement of turning 18 and finally being considered an adult. And then you turn 19, and nothing exciting happens. You wait all year and nothing. Then you turn 20. You wait all year, and nothing. And then you turn 21, you can legally get shitfaced and nobody will care, and because you can legally get shitface wastiepants, suddenly you're treated as more of an adult. You turn 22. Nothing special. You turn 23. Nothing special. 24, 25, 26, 27, 90. Nothing. And I think that's what I'm really afraid of. Turning 21 is my last chance of having a special birthday.

I really hate to be morbid on my birthday, of all days, but I've been thinking this way for a really long time. I just hope that someone somehow proves me wrong.