Hi there. I just turned 19. Some of you have been there and done that. Some of you are on your way there. But none of us ever really wants to be there. Being 19 is like being a can of flat root beer. As if root beer isn’t nauseating enough, try that mess when it’s been lying open on the kitchen counter for a week. Try it every day for two years, because being 19 sucks: It’s a year of desperate limbo. It’s not even real beer.

There are no magazines named Nineteen. There are no uncomfortably skanky stores named Forever 19. This age is so boring that even corporate America hasn’t bothered glorifying it for a little profit. What is this, if not purgatory – some cruel joke played by a bunch of men in powdered wigs some centuries ago? Because I’ll tell you, being 18 was great. It was fantastic.

When I turned 18, I watched infomercials with unprecedented fascination. I could buy myself a Marvin’s Magic Drawing Board! (I could also find out that it doesn’t work. Man, was that anti-climactic.) Among other things I realized I could potentially do: pull a fire alarm in a crowded room (as I did when I was six on Bingo Night), start calling my mother by her first name and get legally kicked out of the house, sign up for my own credit card, find work as a cocktail waitress and book a flight to Topeka. (What would I do in Topeka, once I reached that barren abyss? Until I could figure that out, I would have to sleep in a cornfield with Toto because I wouldn’t be able to put myself up in a hotel room. You have to be 21 to do that.)

The thing about your eighteenth birthday is that when you wake up, you’re a different entity. Nobody looks at you the same way anymore. You’re a big kid now. When you’re 18, all of your fantasies about George Clooney and Harrison Ford are no longer gross and illegal. They’re just gross. When you’re 18, you can go to the big house for stealing – forget all that soft-core juvie stuff.

When you’re 18, you can finally walk into a bar! Wowzers! However, the walk in will be very awkward because once you sit down, you will have to order a Shirley Temple or something. And you will realize that no matter how maturely you ask the waiter, you are indeed ordering a drink originally created for a two-foot-tall, elfin child. Well, here’s my big, sarcastic thank you to the men who devised these wondrous inconveniences. Someone in a sweaty wig thought it a brilliant idea to thrust the newly minted 18-year-old into the adult world, and then leave her lingering in the twilight zone.

But maybe the geezers who decided on our age of majority are inadvertently helping to wean us off the concept of privilege with age. Yeah, you turn 21, never remember that night and bring your wheezing liver to its knees in the ensuing weekends, and then what? You turn 22, 23 and 24. Ladies, we start getting wrinkles at 25. (We can take our wrinkly selves to Enterprise because we can now legally rent cars.) Welcome the debut of puffy, dark circles under your eyes. Treat them to cucumber slices, but they’ll stay anyway, just like your ugly, impish children. Wait a few years for your cellulite to develop. You will stop eating cottage cheese because the sight of it will visibly upset you. It’s a downward spiral into old age, watching cholesterol levels and mortgages. There are no privileges – just mid-life crises and life insurance premiums. CDs don’t hold music anymore; they’re banking jargon. Neutrogena can’t help us now!

Nineteen? It could be worse. I could be on the verge of even more distressing decades: 29, 39, 49. Lord knows, at 59, AARP will buy my address off Crabtree & Evelyn’s mailing list and eat into my mailbox. By then, Zac Efron will be their official spokesman. We’ll all swoon at airbrushed pictures of him with wispy white hair and a slightly protruding belly as he playfully scampers on the beach with his grandchildren, Jooliya and Gymmi, whose names he won’t be able to spell right, in addition to his own.

As appetizing as old age sounds, I’m going to buckle up for a good year, especially since turning 19 comes with the singularly thrilling experience of eligibility for a Costco membership. That’s good – buying margarita mix in bulk might come in handy… in two years.

Nandini Jammi is a sophomore English major. She can be reached at jammin@umd.edu.