In other news, the costuming in Northwestern Dolphin Show’s My Fair Lady was questionable.
I just found this letter I had written to myself on my 20th birthday, nearly a year ago. I’m still not very funny. =(
***
Hey there,
You’ve been alive now for two decades, a quarter of your life, if we assume you’ll die in old age. I would congratulate you and say it was no small feat you managed to achieve adulthood, but let’s face it — with infant mortality rates as low as they are in this country, all you had to worry about was surviving your first year.
So I’m not writing to congratulate you on the anniversary of your coming into existence, because it wasn’t like you had much of a role in it. You were conceived of your parents’ conceit and dispelled into the world like an 8-pound turd. The least you could have done was assist your mother’s efforts, but no. You languished in amniotic inebriation for days after you initially induced labor, procrastinating from the beginning, perhaps afraid of the world but more likely apathetic.
Now I’m not trying to be a killjoy, but at your age, Bill Gates had founded Microsoft and Jane Austen had written “Pride and Prejudice.” Now inherent laziness and intermittent bouts of hedonism may be cute in children and tolerable in teenagers, but now that you’re 20 you have to start assuming some responsibility and providing for your own happiness.
Which means you should stop sleeping through classes and filling your lungs with tar and putting psychedelic holes in your brain and dicking around with dicks and watching Netflix. Call your mother every once in a while. Play basketball with your brother, who desperately needs someone to teach him the ways of the world and social media. Pick up Spanish guitar. Read something — anything — by Dostoevsky, and finish that goddamn novel.
That’s all. Just try to achieve some semblance of financial independence and spiritual peace in the coming years before you hit 30 and books become extinct.
Sincerely you.
Final project for Intro to Painting (with oils). I don’t know what I was thinking. I could have taken stats or microeconomics.
It’s been a soul-crushing six months. =(