"Well, if you must know, it was because he was very jealous, and I had these days of the week underpants."

My birthday is coming up. My 26th birthday to be exact. This Monday I'll be 26. Yikes! I can't believe I'm going to be that old. It's not old old, and I know when I'm a couple decades older 26 will seem incredibly young. Its just... well, as a kid I couldn't imagine myself being this old. I knew I would be, but I couldn't quite grasp what that meant. Every time I imagined myself doing grownup things, I imagined myself as I was, as the current age that I was, only taller. (If that makes any sense... lol.) Old people were old, were adults. Teenagers were a bit older and had a certain position of authority over my young self, but to me they still seemed like kids. Kids on the verge of grownupville but still kids. Like me. Twenty-somethings though, they were this whole other species. They weren't old like the adults, and yet they were still these strange grownup creatures (most of them anyways). I remember looking up to some of the twenty-somethings, admiring them, even idolizing some of them. There was this one girl, she was soooooo cool. I wanted to be just like her when I grew up.

When I first turned 20, I remember feeling this really weird... tingly sensation of realization, like I'd just done a really fast somersault... as it dawned on me that I was now one of those 'twenty-somethings' that I had looked up to as a kid. And I wondered, did any of the little kids I know look up to me in the same way? I liked to think that there was at least one that did. And that gave me the warm fuzzies just thinking about it.

Now I'm a few days shy of being 26. Or, as they would say in the book Pride and Prejudice (which I just finished reading a couple of days ago) six and twenty. That's almost 30! And thinking about that makes me feel old. And so totally and completely unaccomplished.

You know that part in the movie When Harry Met Sally, near the end when Sally is crying about the old boyfriend and she cries that she's going to be 40, and Harry says something like, 'Yeah, in eight years.' Or however many years it was. And Sally says, 'but its there'. I was watching this movie the other day and I never thought that particular line was all that funny before. But now I do. Because I can so relate.

And speaking/typing of birthday's and the movie When Harry Met Sally, the title of this post is a quote from that movie. When I found the quote, it reminded me of a most embarrassing birthday moment that I'd forgotten about for some time now. It was my 7th or 8th birthday party and I was sitting in my living room, surrounded by family and friends, opening up my presents. One by one, I ripped off the wrapping paper, we all oohed and ahhhed over my fabulous new gift, then me and the gift posed together as mom took our picture. This was repeated several times. Then I got to my grandma's gift. (This is were the foreboding music would start to play.)

I ripped off the wrapping paper in giddy anticipation. Grandma and grandpa always got me great stuff. Under the wrapping paper was a cardboard box, the kind that you put clothes in before gift wrapping them. So I tore the top box right off... saw that the clothes inside were little Days of the Week undies... and slammed the lid back down before you can say 'Death By Embarrassment'. There were boys at this birthday party. And they saw my Days of the Week undies!!! Man, that was so embarrassing. Grandma apologized, saying she meant to leave that gift in the car until later. I hastily moved on, got some cool stuff, and quickly got over the whole 'flashing my underwear at boys' thing. At least I wasn't wearing them at the time, right? I waited until I was a couple of years older for that. :)