1. tomorrow, i’ll be seventeen. there’s this odd mix of apathy and kindergarten giddyness with counting down the days, the hours, the seconds before a birthday, for me. i don’t know. for the rest of the world, it’s just another day of births and deaths and deadlines and weddings and puffs of smoke, orgasms, crossing the street, getting your socks on.
  2. the little boy inside me believes that sometime between now and tomorrow morning some magical change will take place inside me, some odd mix of hormones and star-stuff and responsibility. i don’t know. i’m just turning a year older.
  3. seventeen also means one year left of being a teenager, one more year before you’re supposed to make your own legal decisions, be extremely accountable for yourself, just be this adult that you’ve always dreamed of being in your desperate twelve year-old days, the one who goes home late and drives a car and drinks coffee.
  4. it won’t really be my birthday until 3:47 in the afternoon, but i guess that’s irrelevant.
  5. long ago, seventeen year-old boys, no, men were already fathers, heads of households, hunters, struggling to keep their children from dying of some plague. they were recruited into armies trained for actual war against other seventeen year-old boys, knowing that they don’t have much left. most seventeen year-old boys here and now are still high schoolers, not overenthusiastic n00bs drowning in university life, like me.
  6. i wonder if my grandparents (or even my parents) wish they could experience being seventeen again. if i were seventeen again, i would have lived a little more!, they’d probably say.
  7. i don’t know, aren’t seventeen year-olds living enough? i’m not one to say so, i guess: i don’t party, i don’t drink, i don’t go out and get lost and get home late.
  8. aren’t i living enough?
  9. what does being seventeen feel like? all the angst and joy and lust and frustration and laziness of being sixteen, only with the added pressure that it’s probably your last chance to feel like that and be a general spaz until you literally have to start acting like an adult because you actually are one?
  10. lykke li: so come on honey blow yourself to pieces / come on honey give yourself completely / and do it all although you can’t believe it / youth knows no pain / youth knows no pain. feeling and knowing are two very different things, aren’t they? maybe it’s different. we grow less numb as we grow older, perhaps? or the sting is there, we just refuse to feel it?
  11. i share my birthday with tom hardy and prince harry and agatha christie.
  12. how different would it have been if anne frank were seventeen when she wrote her diary? she never made it to seventeen. peter van pels was sixteen.
  13. remember the book chasing vermeer and how calder and tommy promised themselves that they wouldn’t be mediocre kids, that they’d achieve greatness or something like that? it’s always been my dream to do something great as a kid, get people thinking, hey, look, that kid did this, that kid did that. sure, being someone at eighteen sure sounds great, but by then, you’ll just be young and not young enough.
  14. a year will be what i make it. a year will be where god pushes me. a year will just be another one.
  15. ugh i need a driver’s license.
  16. tomorrow, i will wake up, not looking any more glamorous than i was when i went to sleep. i’ll have muck in my eyes and dried spit on my pillow and probably some awkward bodily morning routines. the world will keep on turning, people will be born and people will die. others will celebrate their birthdays but the world will not stop just for me.
  17. but it will be great. i’ll get up and think, there’s just so much more to do. let’s go.