28 Years and 1 Day Old

I’ve officially completed 28* full years of existence (*This number is dependent on your stance on when life begins. For most, it’s the moment you first heard Beyoncé, Destiny’s Child included).

I wrote this list when I was still innocent and fearful of accidentally becoming a member of the 27 club through some fatal combination of Thin Mints and scented candles around my bed, which is pretty farfetched even for me.

Interested in what I had to look forward to this year, I turned to Google, only to be given some seriously conflicting information about my marriageability, my supposed career priorities, my general sense of happiness and my well-being.

Wanting something a little more aspirational and slightly more functional, I decided to search for some major accomplishments in science, literature and pop culture. Since my major accomplishments include multiple screenshots of Helen Hunt’s hair accessories in Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, I knew I would have to seriously measure up.

8 Things Famous People Accomplished By 28 That I Am Nowhere Near Accomplishing

• “James Joyce publishes A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and starts work on Ulysses.” I have gone 28 years having never read either.
• “Guglielmo Marconi transmits the first radio message to cross the Atlantic from North America.” I probably won’t listen to a traditional radio this year, so congrats Marconi.
• “Joni Mitchell has her first hit single, ‘You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio.'” Similarly, I’ve cried out of stress at my desk while listening to Joni Mitchell.
• “Paul McCartney goes solo.” So do I, Paul, so do I.
• “Elizabeth Taylor becomes the highest-paid female actor in history when she signs a $1m contract to star in Cleopatra.” *insert clever joke about student loan debt here*
• “Quentin Tarantino debuts his first film Reservoir Dogs at the Sundance film festival.” I have the Sundance channel because my roommate made us get cable.
• “Mark Zuckerberg introduces Facebook on the stock market.” I’ll be logging on to Facebook to thank people for noticing their birthday alerts and writing “Happy Birthday” on my wall.
• “Ludwig L Zamenhof invents the language Esperanto.”  I hope to use my 28th year communicating solely in gif.

Lesson learned 1 day into this new age: Don’t Google age milestones.