As I write this column, it\u2019s my birthday. Not an ordinary birthday, but my twenty-first birthday. The birthday that I, and many others, have looked forward to with eager anticipation. I can finally drink alcohol, legally.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, I, and the many others who have eagerly anticipated their twenty-first birthday, have also been drinking alcohol since we were teenagers. We have scrubbed off black Xs, used fake IDs and pre-gamed at our older friends\u2019 apartments. Underage drinking culture has become a normality of youth.<\/p>\n
In addition to being dangerous, adolescent drinking has dulled the excitement of turning twenty-one. The allure of legal drinking has lost its appeal.<\/p>\n
For many young adults, the festivities of a twenty-first birthday have become the normal weekend routine.<\/p>\n
I celebrated my own twenty-first birthday last night at midnight. I went to Sixth Street in Austin, like every person who has ever turned twenty-one in Texas.<\/p>\n
Despite staying in a swanky downtown hotel, being surrounded by the people I love and wearing the outfit that I had picked out weeks ago, my twenty-first birthday felt strangely uneventful. The question, \u201cThis is it?\u201d continuously turned over in my mind. It was not that I was ungrateful, or that I didn\u2019t have a great time. I danced for hours, took too many Snapchat videos and drank an unhealthy amount of alcohol. Yet, the entire night I could feel an underlying sense of familiarity.<\/p>\n
I had done all of this before.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t until this morning, my actual birthday, that I realized why the night felt off. I have been drinking alcohol for years.<\/p>\n
I was under the na\u00efve impression that my first legal drink would be remarkably different. It wasn\u2019t. It was just a normal vodka pineapple. It tasted exactly like every other vodka pineapple I have had before.<\/p>\n
I know underage drinking will always exist. It would be impossible to eradicate this behavior because alcohol influences our culture so heavily. I just want it to slow down. I wish I had slowed down, or waited to drink alcohol until I was of legal age. Maybe if I had waited, my twenty-first birthday would have been the glamourous night that I had always fantasized it to be. Then again, I may not have remembered it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As I write this column, it\u2019s my birthday. Not an ordinary birthday, but my twenty-first birthday. The birthday that I, and many others, have looked… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[167],"class_list":["post-1457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"aioseo_notices":[],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"authors":[{"term_id":167,"user_id":15,"is_guest":0,"slug":"sprinkles-kelby","display_name":"Kelby Sprinkles","avatar_url":"https:\/\/thesouthtexan.com\/wp-content\/litespeed\/avatar\/589b2a7f865123bf180131ac912a679b.jpg?ver=1778637593","0":null,"1":"","2":"","3":"","4":"","5":"","6":"","7":"","8":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesouthtexan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesouthtexan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesouthtexan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesouthtexan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesouthtexan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1457"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thesouthtexan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1460,"href":"https:\/\/thesouthtexan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1457\/revisions\/1460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesouthtexan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesouthtexan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesouthtexan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1457"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesouthtexan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=1457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}