I’ve always enjoyed having a June birthday. It’s right before school gets out for the summer, so in grade school, I was able to invite my whole class to celebrate. And it was nowhere near Christmas, so I didn’t have to worry about my parents combining birthday and holiday gifts.
My love for my birthdate continued through college. Spending my birthdays in warm, June-time Eugene weather was great — until junior year. Once fall term came around, my friends started to turn 21 and left me behind.
There were countless nights this year when I’d receive an invitation to a party that was a pregame to the bars in disguise. Getting up off the couch to go somewhere with the knowledge that everyone would inevitably ditch me later didn’t sound like much fun.
Even when the energy was high at house parties, the time would always come for the mass exodus to the bars, leaving my fellow minors and me to finish all the half-empty cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon.
When I’d try to plan some fun underage activity like laser tag or bowling, most of my friends had spent too much of their money at the bars and couldn’t go. Much of Eugene acts like there is nothing more fun to do on the weekends than go to the usually overcrowded campus bars.
A lot of us with summer birthdays get the question, “Why don’t you have a fake I.D.?” We want to come up with some witty answer, but in the end, there are lots of reasons; it’s expensive, we got it taken away by a Max’s bouncer. It costs precious cash that we could just give to a friend to buy alcohol for us.
But having an end-of-the-year 21-er wasn’t all bad.  When I turned 21, almost all of my friends were able to go out with me, which meant free drink after drink. I never had to worry about trying to go to the bars with older friends who I wasn’t close with.
My friends already knew when to hit which bars, where to order which drinks and they were more than eager to teach me the ropes of being 21.
The bars weren’t everything I expected. Don’t get me wrong; they’re fun. I went out four nights in a row for my birthday. But I had put the bars on such a high pedestal for so long that when it was finally time to go, I was disappointed.
This was what everyone had been raving about? Being tightly packed in a dark room having to fight your way to the bartender to get an overpriced drink?
Regardless, I am sure over the next year I will continue going to the crowded bars weekend after weekend. But having discovered what they’re actually like, I realize I shouldn’t have wasted time feeling left out.
The best part about being 21 is not the fact that I can go out to bars or carry closed containers around the streets, but that I can order drinks with dinner. For example, I recently had a 45 minute wait at The Vintage in Eugene. And after a couple of Vintage Lemonades, it only felt like 15.
Now I’m off to Las Vegas, where I was raised, to finally enjoy my birthday the right way.
Follow Tanner Owens on Twitter @T_Owens21