It’s true boys and girls, yours truly has finally hit the big leagues. The long tedious wait is behind me, the countdown that began 366 days ago is over. As of Wednesday at midnight (or Thursday at 12:01 I can’t remember which is correct) I became a legal beer-drinking, shot-guzzling, bar stool-warming, lottery ticket-buying, 21-year-old.

Do I feel any different? Sure, at the moment I have a splitting headache, but that is beside the point. I am actually a bit sad knowing that, as with every birthday, I am getting a little older, and time does not stand still for anyone.

It’s kind of funny. When you’re a kid you hope and pray to get older, but once you finally are, you wish you were young again. We wait and wait ’til we are old enough to do things, and when we finally can, we realize that it wasn’t that big of a deal.

For example, it’s when you are finally old enough to see an R-rated movie or travel on a plane without adult supervision.

I still can’t rent a car or run for president, but my friend Amy Jack informed me that I now can obtain an international driver’s license. I’m not sure of the good this does for me, considering the farthest I’ve traveled is my occasional run for the border, and I just used my Iowa license to go to Taco Bell.

Age is used to describe who we are as people. Just as height, hair color and profession, age is used to define a person. The police blotter and obituaries print ages, and if a criminal is at large, the media use it as part of the description.

Age is also used to mark time. I remember being 5 when I was on the “Floppy Show,” 8 when I busted my dad for scarfing down the cookies left specially for Santa, 10 when the Challenger exploded, and 15 when the Madrid Tigers won the state title in football (who doesn’t remember that?).

Twenty-one is a milestone birthday. As with your 13th birthday when you are officially a teen, 16th when you’re old enough to drive, and 18th when you can be called (but perhaps not treated as) an adult.

The milestone birthdays become few and far between when you get older and most people don’t get as excited for their 50th or their 100th (but it probably isn’t a good idea to get too excited if you are 100-years-old, anyway).

The biggest part of age I don’t understand is how your biological age is used to measure everything else about you. Wednesday I couldn’t walk into the bar and order a beer, but miraculously Thursday I could. How much time did that one day allow me to mature as a person and understand the responsibilities of drinking?

For three months after I turned 18, I could purchase lottery tickets and go to a casino and lose my life savings (about $7 I think).

But then the Legislature decided to change the law when Prairie Meadows brought in its slot machines. Suddenly I wasn’t old enough to gamble, but before I was. Had my mentality regressed? Was I less able to make decisions on my own? Would I be less likely to gamble away my soul when I’m 30?

The part that worries me most about aging, is the loss of compassion many people gain with age. The older we get, the less we seem to care about the young. I wish the bars had been open to me when I was 19, like they are in Cedar Falls and Iowa City. Yet now that I am 21-years-and-one-day- old I could care less if they allow minors in to hang out, actually I don’t think they should. (Oh, how the tables have turned.) I mean, I had to wait, why should they be allowed something I wasn’t?

The rules and laws of the young are made by the old, pure and simple. If it doesn’t really affect them or the people who fund their campaigns they don’t have as much time.

Another year, another birthday, another mark of who we are. The further away we make middle age, and define the word “old” the younger we stay. I would like to think age is a state of mind. I know 14-year- olds who act like they are 30 and 30-year- olds who act like they are 10. I think it was the lady in the Depends commercial who summed it up best, “You’re only as old as you feel.”

Leana Benson is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Madrid.