The Night in Question

3 weeks ago, I turned 30. 

I've been in grad. school just outside D.C. for a year now, and decided to take advantage of this for the occasion.

I invited my friends to come on a bar crawl in the city with me. I sat there excitedly creating the Facebook event for some time, writing it just so. I had been designing it in my mind for months.  Birthdays are a big deal to me, and this was the biggest one I could conceive of.

I mean, THIRTY. What did it even mean? I wondered. A mixture of fear, excitement, and apathy floated about in my mind and shuddered in my chest when I stopped to think about the number that would soon apply to me.

Was I about to become an honest-to-God woman now? Was it officially time to retire the title of 'girl' once and for all? In many ways, 30 felt like a demarcation of true adulthood.

The more I thought about it, the more I felt like getting wildly drunk.

So I Googled and re-Googled "someecards" alongside "alcohol," looking specifically for ones with messages of imminent inebriation.  I had decided about a month before that my event tagline would read "I'm turning 30 -- please come help me forget."

I found one eventually that said "I can't wait to be ashamed of what I do this weekend."

"Perfect!" I thought, and with the click of a couple buttons, the thing was done. 

That Saturday night, 15ish people came out to celebrate with me. We met up for pizza in Adams Morgan, where I told the waiter I would have a 'Bad Decision'. Inwardly I trilled. The night of debauchery had begun.

He brought me something blue of unknown liquor content. The cocktail menu had said not to ask, so I didn't.

Then, as the pizza arrived and my intake of carbs commenced, the waiter made his way back to the table with lots of little pink shots in hand. He started slamming them down on the table in front of me. "Merry Christmas," he said. 

After dinner, we headed across the street to some sort of a whiskey basement. Maybe it was actually called the Basement. The pink shots and blue mystery drinks are currently obscuring my memory.

It was empty when we walked in, and part of me thought, "At least we'll be able to hear each other talk." 

But another part of me inwardly whined and stomped; wishing it was much more like that moment in Dirty Dancing when Baby and Johnny's cousin burst into the staff quarters and witness the wild bumping and grinding, and she's all "I carried a watermelon?"

Then someone bought me a whiskey shot. And some tequila. And I stopped worrying for a minute about it not being quite like Dirty Dancing.

By then I'd had 4 or 5 drinks, and enough pizza that I wasn't really feeling them. I realized this in a moment of combined relief and distress. I hate to be hungover, and have learned the hard way just how miserable I am the day after drinking too much. But it was the last night of my 20s. Wasn't I supposed to be totally blitzed by now?

Admit it, I thought to myself. You don't really want to be.

And then a bunch of my friends started to leave. Some were sick, others just not night-owls. Three stayed, and we went to another bar and met up with somebody else's friends. I felt a little lame that so many of my friends had left so early. 

But then I looked around at the pulsing D.C. street. I was in this place I had always loved. It had taken me 30 years to get here, but here I was, as midnight hit and my 20s officially slipped away. 

I shifted in my short black dress, ordered a Cosmo because it felt like a grown-up drink, and tried to tell myself that it was okay not to be shit-faced or sober on my big, scary birthday. I was 30 years old, and somewhere in between.