A person's 21st birthday signifies their real entrance into adulthood—at least in the United States. You can finally go out drinking, buy your own alcohol and get a license picture that actually resembles you as an adult. Over the course of a year or so, all of the friends you've had through school and life are finally turning 21. Some of them are already even older, but you with that November or December birthday have to watch from the sidelines as everyone else leaps into adulthood downing shot after shot of tequila. Your friends come up with nicknames like "The Baby" and tell you all about their escapades at this bar or that one as you try to pretend you're in a parallel universe where you're not the youngest person in your friend group.
The thing about turning 21 late in the year after everyone else is that by the time you actually turn 21, it's lost the hype. I'm sure you never had a drop of alcohol before turning 21, but once all of your friends did, it wasn't really difficult to access some booze if you really wanted it - and the easy access just made drinking seem a lot less cool than what it's been made out to be. Of course it still stinks to go out to dinner with your friends and sip on a soda while they all get appletini-margarita-vodkas or whatever adults get to drink. I once went to the House of Blues at Downtown Disney with some friends for the last under-21 night the establishment was ever going to have again. My friends wanted to get there early because before 11 p.m. girls drank for free (and who doesn't like free alcohol, right)? They got their free drinks and I sipped my $3 soda while we watched old people dance to 80's and 90's classics until the over-40 crowd left for the night. I have to admit that it was a good time, despite feeling like a toddler at a club filled with adults.
While perpetually sitting at the kids table watching your more adult friends sip on wine from red solo cups is terrible, there are some positives to it. When you're the only sober one, you can get a lot of really great blackmail. Your friends can party as hard as they want and all you have to do is sit back and wait for them to do something ridiculous. The best part is reminding them about it in the morning while showing them the pictures you took of them passed out with a bag of chips.
Spending the year underage while all of your friends cross over into "real" adulthood can be a little bit lonely. You have something that you can't really share with them because you were born a few months later. But enduring those months of an age gap will be well worth it when you all start to turn 30 and you retain your youth while they develop wrinkles and gray hairs.
