the birthday project: hey, nineteen.

I've had some pretty killer birthdays in my time. With my Big Three One coming up next week, I thought I'd take a little trip down memory lane, starting with the year I became a liquor-buying adult.

I turned 19 in June of 1999. I'd finished highschool the previous January, and instead of doing what most kids do with six months of free time (Go To Europe! Start University Early!), I'd whiled away the days working part-time at the library, going to a lot of really sketchy raves, and smoking a tremendous amount of hash. My birthday fell just a few days before my highschool graduation; it was also the day of my last-ever piano recital. Preoccupied with my impending ascent to the age of majority and all the freedom and fear that this transition held (also, very stoned), I had really shit the bed on practicing my piece. I performed a series of postmodern variations on Land of the Silver Birch, poorly.

After the recital my boyfriend and I went over to a friend's house, the kind of friend whose mother was never home. We smoked pot out of a bong made of an old Slurpee cup--a special edition Slurpee cup, shaped like an alien. My parents had given me a bottle of Blue Nun wine as a present which remained unopened that night. I remember finding it really funny that on the first day I was actually allowed to buy booze, I didn't drink a single drop. Years later, I found out that Blue Nun was Judy Garland's favourite wine.

A few days later, we all graduated from highschool. There was a huge party at my friend Kathryn's house. Kathryn and I would go on to become insanely good friends when we went away to the same university, but at the time we'd only had a couple of classes together. My boyfriend showed some other kids from our class how to do bottle tokes out of a peach schnapps container--we had quite the makeshift pipe repertoire in those days. All in all the whole night felt like an out of body experience. I had the sudden, bracing feeling that I was ready for this particular chapter of my life to be over. A few months later, when I moved to Toronto, it was.