At the end of the day you're another day older...

Seventeen years ago today I began my sojourn on this plane of existence. Today I am seventeen years closer to moving on to heaven than I was then. On a less cosmic scale, it's my birthday and I feel like a grown-up. It's strange. I told a five-year-old friend of mine that I felt like a grown-up, and she asked me how many more years I had until I was a grown-up, and the best answer I had was "Well, it depends on the person." So is this it? Am I done being a kid? When I was little, my parents taught me the difference between "growing up on the inside" and "growing up on the outside". (Pretty hilarious side bar: Growing up with a mom who was a teacher and a dad who wants to be a professor when he grows up has some unavoidable side effects. The other day, we went to see the Pirates of Penzance, which is fan-flippin'-tastic, and as we were walking around the parking garage looking for our car, Mom said, and I quote, "So, based solely on the content of the opera, what societal changes were Gilbert and Sullivan commenting on?" In case you want to know, the answer is that they were satirizing devotion to duty taking precedent to common sense. This kind of thing happens all the time. And people wonder why I'm so tweaked out. Thus ends my very long, parenthetical anecdote. We return now to our previously scheduled nonsense. You may want to go back and read what I was talking about before I opened this can of Pandora's boxes. Go on. I'll wait.) I feel grown up, both on the outside and the inside. On the inside, I feel like I should be doing more grown up things. I should be able to drive myself places. I should be able to wake myself up in the morning consistently. I should be able to cook for myself (after all, why learn to cook if you can just make Tanner do it for you?). I've got enough maturity to take care of myself, but I'm not competent enough. So it's a bittersweet birthday. I never really felt like a high school student, even though I go to high school. I just found out the other day that I missed all this year's football games, so now I never will have gone to a high school game. Would that I hadn't. (Subjunctive tense!) Oh well. Maybe I'll make it to a baseball game... maybe. I'd rather just be done with high school as soon as possible. Only 105 days of compulsory schooling left!