Sweet Seventeen

Yesterday, I turned 17!! That's so wild considering that when How Fitting was founded, I was at the ripe age of 13 with no actual sense of self (not that I fully have one now, it's improvement.). It really just is amazing how oddly different and similar I am from the seventh grade version of myself imprinted on the Internet. Forever. Ugh.

Seventeen is a rather odd and awkward age to turn. First off, there's so much in between. It feels like I've been in between forever. In the words of Francine Pascal, "I am seventeen. The good things about seventeen is that you’re not sixteen. Sixteen goes with the word sweet, and I am so far from sweet." and I take some sort of connection with that- a lot of being seventeen is no longer being sixteen. I'm on the cusp of legal adulthood and I'm nervous and excited and happy to just kind of hang back and be seventeen and not sixteen and do adult things such as driving a car (horrible at it. terrible. never good idea.) yet fully shying away from anything with unappealing responsibility. 

Along with this is the copious amounts of media surrounding the age of seventeen. I mean if we want to bring it back to my infamous emo days, there's an All Time Low song that says, "stay seventeen" and for some reason I was like "god I really can't wait to be seventeen because of this shitty song"- with magazines titles and lines from Abba songs, seventeen seemed like some sort of club to thirteen year old Ann. Television and music and film and photography made sixteen a rather pressured year for me to constantly have fun and be spontaneous and "be sixteen" be sixteen. be sixteen. And I don't want to feel constantly like I'm wasting some "precious" year (I'll honestly forget in twenty years) whenever I'm not be cinematically worthy. That's a boring and exhausting way to live. 

I sobbed the night before my birthday. I was organizing my DVD collection and fantasizing over what I'm spending my first paycheck on (as in a JOB. I have a job that PAYS. How crazy is that??) and something stupid triggered it like my phone charger breaking or not being able to find the lens cap to one of my cameras and I just broke down. I love birthdays. I hate my birthday. Similar to my feeling of pressure to have a grand ol' time at sixteen years old, I always feel like my birthday has to be some sort of magical, wonderful, day and I hate that. I hate expectations. Along with this was the actual fear of aging. It feels like I've fast forwarded through everything and now here I am and I don't really know what to do with that. 

The actual daytime piece of my birthday was quite plain and simple and average. It was Kol Nidrei (eve of Yom Kippur) that night and so my parents (who were observing the holiday) did not go out to dinner with me, which I was quite emo over at first but in the end, there was really no point in getting upset over trivial things like this. I shot a couple of photos of my grand entrance into the Great Seventeen Club (aka photographic masturbation) on my stuffed animal covered bed. I ended up being quite typical and watching The Naked Brothers Band Movie on the tv I stole off the side of the road that one time   as I do for every other milestone of my life. 

me holding up one of Ben's gifts

Actual night of the big one seven: I cried. Multiple times. I ended up going out for burritos with Anh and Ben and sitting in the park dipping chips into rice and beans and reading through mixtape playlists and eating sponge cake and being upstairs in my bedroom playing guitar and hanging upside down off my bed. All very surreal.

bedroom scene 

Overall, I'm not sure where I'm at with birthdays. I guess I've reconciled the birthday curse and understand the lack of perfection within them and the triviality of it all. In the use of a cliche, overused, Bradbury quote, "I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane." I hope to take this year to become less impulsive, twitchy, and restless and all the more. 

sweet 17: gifts