21st birthday overrated hype; black out or back out
Marissa Villarreal
When it comes to birthdays there are only a handful of truly important ones – when you turn 16-years-old, it’s all about getting your drivers license and possibly your own set of wheels. When you turn 18-years-old, you’re finally labeled an adult who can buy their own cigarettes and maybe go to a club or two. But when you hit the big 2 – 1, it appears to be the age of all ages where you can finally go to the bars and drink as much alcohol as your liver will allow you to consume but with my 21st coming up, I don’t really see all the hype.
It is no surprise that drinking on your 21st birthday is the only way to spend the night but it just seems very overrated to me.
For my birthday, I do not plan on hopping the bars of Mill Avenue or to party the night away in Scottsdale and you definitely will not find me in the strips of Las Vegas. Why?
Because the build up and hype of turning 21-years-old is just all made up hype so you can have an excuse to look like a drunk mess on your birthday but it’s amusing because I find that a lot of college students, 21 or not, do not wait until their 21st birthday to drink alcohol so when the time finally comes for their driver license to make a very official horizontal turn,
they’ve already experienced plenty of drunk nights before.
If anything it devalues the overall 21st birthday experience, making it just another night of drunk escapades.
Your birthday should be a special day to celebrate with friends and family, and if incorporating alcohol into that is the way to go for you then so be it but I just believe holding drunken expectations of others around you is not how a birthday should be spent.
If my birthday will consist of anything, it will be of plenty of good times with my friends at one of my favorite resturants sipping on classy martinis and downing only a couple shots of that good stuff but not a wild night of jumping from bar to bar, blacking out from beer and a mixture of other alchoholic beverages only to find myself laying across my bathroom floor hugging my toliet puking for the remainder of the night then to wake up with the worlds biggest hangover and a completely empty wallet. I’m sorry that just does not seem like an enjoyable night to me. I guess that’s just not the type of person I am.
I would like to to be able to celebrate my birthday without the expectations or pressure of everyone else trying to get me blacked out to the point where I will most likely not remember the majority of the night.
So on my 21st, I’ll drink for sure but I’m not trying to get “turnt up” just because it is an overrated norm.
