Hello 24, Goodbye Youth!

I am old.

Ok ok, well I guess technically I'm in the prime of my life, but I feel damn old. As of today, I'm no longer in my early 20's! I'm now in my early-mid-20's! Yikes.

I'm half way to 48! I have a few friends who are Married!

What's funny is that despite my age, I still pretty much the same as "little Arun." How is this you ask? Let me give you a short list.

1. I'm still quite adorable :)
2. I smile a lot.
3. I sing everywhere and all the time.
4. Ghostbusters is still my favorite movie and if I had a choice, I would forgo the plastic grocery bag I bring my lunch in for a "Real Ghostbusters" lunch box.
5. I love sweets and dessert items and crave them with reckless abandon.
6. In any big problem or emergency, the first person I think of to call and fix everything is my Mom.

Of course my maturity and mindset are totally different. One of the biggest things is money. When I was a kid I used to think, "Gee when I grow up I'm gonna buy all this awesome stuff, and everytime I go shopping, I'm gonna buy the Snicker's bar I was never allowed to have!"

Now, sure I buy SOME awesome stuff, but my main goal is to parle' all this money into becoming incredibly wealthy. I almost never buy candy at the store, and I actually use coupons!

Luckily, my desire when I was two years old to marry my Mom has also passed.

When I was a kid, before my birthday or Christmas, I'd give my Mom a stack of Toy Flyers from the Sunday paper conveniently marked up with items circled that I desperately wanted. Then, I'd peruse Toys R Us for AGES! Now, I can't think of anything I really want!

Somewhere along the line of growing up, I decided to forgo the Velcro shoes, then went to the two-bow shoelace tying strategy (also known as the "bunny ears") and finally graduated to the much more efficient single bow with the loop-around.

I do, however miss the days of playing with boats in the bath, rocking the latest Bugle Boy Shirt, waking up obscenely early on Saturday Mornings for cartoons, and having birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese.

And speaking of Chuck E. Cheese, man what a disappointment those places are when you go as an adult. I was at Boomer's game place last year and was all excited to play "Ski Ball" (the one where you bowl the little wooden balls up the ramp and into the plastic circle things). The ramp is seriously like 1/4 as long as I remember it! I could seriously lean forward and practically toss the ball in!

Oh well. 23 was a great year and every year of my life has seem to have been better than the last.

Birthdays are always great because you get calls and messages from everyone and are doted on more than usual!

Somehow, I need to figure out a way to harness this doting, and get it to happen everyday! As soon as I figure this out, I'll add it to Appendix K in "Arun's Guide Lifetime Awesomeness"