Your favorite birthday

( The list )

After the "favorite memory" entry, this one's not too tough to guess.

The day of my eighteenth birthday started at a Greyhound station in Sacramento with Mike, Liz, and Sarah, three people who have played important roles in my life. Sarah left about ten minutes after midnight, and the rest of us ended up in a police car before finally locating somewhere to sleep. I, of course, thought the police car trip was the best birthday present ever. (It is possible that I am secretly a three-year-old boy.) In the morning, we got on an Amtrak train that passed through the city where I was born and lived until I was thirteen, and I got to have a nice little symbolic moment of riding the train away from it. We ended the day in Dublin, where Jeanette made incredible vegan enchiladas for dinner. (You guys, these enchiladas were a freaking religious experience, I am telling you. Even Mike liked them, and this was back when chow mein was too exotic for his palate.) She also made a vegan cake for me, and we played Apples to Apples all evening.

Aside from the specifics of the day, there was of course the legal transition into adulthood. I've wanted to be an adult all my life; my grandmother used to tell her friends I was "nine going on thirty-seven." I have always hated being told to slow down and enjoy childhood. I haven't been an official adult for very long now, but so far, I'm 100% behind my former self on this one. Being a grownup is great. Yeah, it can be stressful and hard, but in that regard, it has nothing on being a kid.

Something you regret

( The list )

This is a pretty horrendous cliche, but it's true: I value my mistakes because of what I've learned from them. I can think of plenty of things I did that I shouldn't have done, but I can't think of a single one that didn't lead to some important lesson or silver lining I wouldn't want to give up. The times when I've screwed myself over, I wouldn't take back.

That said... when I was a kid, maybe nine or so, I had two pet mice, and I forgot to feed them for long enough that one of them ate the other one. Finding the aftermath of this was possibly the most traumatic experience of my life. Screwing myself over is fine, and I usually find a way to get something out of it in the end. But screwing others over is not okay. My true regrets are situations where I messed up and someone else got shafted for it.