1st birthday: Family members pinch your cheeks and gush over how much you look like your Dad. Actually, who knows what happened. You were a one-year-old -- comprehension wasn't within your ability to poop and cry.

10th: Giggly sleepovers with New Kids on the Block sleeping bags, gossiping friends and a general sense that you're important (I even wore a bright pin exclaiming: "I'm the Birthday Girl!").

13th: You're a teenager. You don't feel any different, as you bounce around your room to the beats of a song that in five years you'll be ashamed to have ever liked. You complain and whine: "Three more years until I can drive to the mall."

16th: "The Sweet One." No more sitting in your parent's minivan outside the movie theater, where you once awkwardly tried to avoid the stares of the people who must've thought you were the biggest loser in the world -- even though their identical minivan drove away minutes before.

18th: You are an adult. An adult? That's right. You can vote, and not just in high school student council elections. You can buy scratch lottery tickets. You can buy cigarettes.

You scream at your parents: "I'm an adult now, so get off my back." Your parents scream back: "Fine. If you're such an adult, why don't you start paying rent?" Suddenly, being an adult isn't so cool. You go to college.

You think you know freedom and you whine: "Three more years until I can drink in the bars with all the cool kids."

Birthdays are important days in our lives, but certain years mark major milestones. As kids, we spend a lot of time thinking about getting older and how cool it'll be to do things on our own.

I remember when I used to imagine what it would be like to have braces. I'd stand on the playground in fifth grade and wonder how you could kiss with braces, but I didn't let it bother me much -- as long as braces meant I was getting older and, as a result, cooler.

Now, though, as I sit here just a few days after my 21st birthday -- the last major milestone until 30 -- I'm struck by this instinct that I missed something in the lifelong anticipation of getting older.

Twenty-one can certainly be added to the list of major birthdays. Maybe doing so will bring some perspective to the fact that as college students, turning 21 is the last bit of excitement before we enter the "real world" -- whatever that is.

I'm sure you must be thinking that turning 21 is the best birthday ever, that it far surpasses the glory of buying a pack of Marlboro Lights just because you can.

That turning 21 marks the most exciting portion of your life and the beginning of the rest of your life. Hell, you can even head to Vegas, get hitched like Britney Spears and take the casinos for millions.

Sounds pretty good.

That is, until you wake up from your tequila hangover and spend a full day of being legal. You are expected to be an adult.

This is your last birthday before it starts getting serious, before you have to start paying the bills.

You have only nine more years until you are 30.

30?!

Yes. Scary, I know.

In some ways, turning 21 is the most anti-climatic day in the world. Sure, I'm happy to be able to have a glass of wine at a restaurant, to appreciate State College post-21.

I'm glad that I can go to any concert without the embarrassment of the "you're-an-under-21-loser" X the bouncers draw on your palm.

Now, instead of asking me what college I go to, adults ask me what I'm going to do with my life. Usually, I'm my polite old self, but inside I'm screaming, " I don't know, I'm going to live! Leave me alone!"

Why has turning 21 simultaneously become the day you enter into adulthood and the day you perform a rite of passage into the leagues of drunk college students everywhere?

When you think about it, being "legal" is sort of a moot point. Most people (especially in Happy Valley) have had a drink or two before their 21st. Most college-age students have or know someone who has a fake ID.

In a way, turning 21 has lost its mystique. It's no longer just a day of partying, but a day where you are drunkenly supposed to have your life figured out.

I wonder, though, what would happen if we stopped putting so much pressure on major lifetime milestones. Would the birthdays be like any another day? Or would it allow our 22nd, 23rd and 24th to be that much more interesting?

What's in a day anyway?

When we put so much pressure on a single day, we ask the birthday boy or girl to do the unthinkable: We expect them to know what it means to be a certain age.

But, when adults ask me what I'm going to do with my life, it's comforting to know they were probably as clueless as I was on their 21st birthdays.