Let's all be honest here, Britney Spears probably hasn't been right about anything in like 15 years. Or more accurately, she hasn't been right about anything since February 18, 2002 when she released the song "Not a Girl, Not yet a Woman" from the Crossroads movie soundtrack.
Now for all you hipsters who are like "Oh, I'm not familiar, I really only listen to Neutral Milk Hotel" y'all can save it cause I know buried deep inside those high-waisted jeans is an awkward 11-year-old girl who knows every word to that song and considers it her personal anthem. It's a sweet jam and in the video she's wearing a crop top in the desert in Utah (crop-tops in Utah I think might be illegal, so it's pretty scandalous). And she gave voice to a bunch of bitches who had just figured out what eyeliner was. That being said, now that I am 22 (don't listen to Taylor Swift, it's not miserable and magical at all) and not 11 I've got some serious beef with that song and to be honest it kinda fucked me up. Here's why.
This is what it actually feels like to be not a girl not yet a woman. You're young enough to go out drinking on a Monday afternoon and old enough to take a good hard look at yourself in the mirror the next morning. You're young enough to still wear leggings as pants but old enough to realize you really need to start doing some squats. You're young enough to consider Mr. Noodles a food group and old enough to start looking in to juice cleanses. That is some confusing shit dude!
Being in your twenties is not at all like what everyone told me (including Britney!). "You're gonna be so broke!" Yeah that's true but I've also never had money so I literally don't even notice how poor I am until a real adult draws attention to it. "You need more experience." Um, duh! Do you know how recently I went through puberty? If you did it would shock you.
Of course, no one cares about my opinion yet I pretty recently started using tampons, how's that for needing more experience. "All I need is time, a moment that is mine," (an actual Britney lyric) that is just patently wrong. For the majority of my day yesterday I read a Chelsea Handler book. If I had more moments that were mine I'd probably do something fucking dumb like start a YouTube channel or heroin. Nobody warned me that I wouldn't always remember to feed myself, or that after you're done school it's really hard to make new friends, or that the majority of things you do as an adult are really friggin' boring!
As I've been writing this blog post (a supremely 20-something post-grad thing of me to say) my beautiful roommate came home from work. You wanna know what not being a girl and not yet being a woman is? This bitch got up at 4:45 a.m. got ready for work and made friends with a Jamaican Streetcar driver named Maurice. She than worked at a book store until 10 a.m. Then she got back on the streetcar (which Maurice was driving, small world right?) came home, microwaved old pizza, and is currently eating it in her bed and watching Dawson's Creek. Somebody autotune that, put on a crop top and go to Utah and try to sell it. I guarantee there is a huge market of lost ladies between the ages of 21 and 26 who would buy that.
I know I just need to stick it out and keep living this weirdo lifestyle and then I'll figure out what I'm doing here. I know a lot of pretty cool 40-year-olds who seemed to have figured it out so I have high hopes for myself. I am gonna stop listening to the lyrical genius of Britney Spears. Being 22 isn't one big poem that you can shout from a mountain in Utah, it's pretty gross. That being said, that Beyonce seems like she's got her shit pretty much all the way together. I'll just listen to her until my 30th birthday.
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