Growing up, I always felt older than my peers.

It’s a typical trait of the Only Child, I suppose — constantly surrounded by adults at dinner tables and such.  My friends’ parents would remark, “What a little lady!”, and many a time I was called “an old soul.”

At twenty-seven, I’ve now come to understand that all of you have caught up to me, maturity-wise. You, flooding my social media newsfeeds with your engagement rings and newborns and mortgages? You’ve got it all figured out, right?  I, meanwhile, seem to have regressed to a youth I’m not entirely convinced I lived the first time around.

But it’s quite alright:

HOME: I now live with my best friend friend Matt in Woodruff Place, which is this neighborhood of artists, and older gays, and roustabouts. We live on a less-than-desirable corner, which means sometimes I play fun games like “Rape Roulette: Briskly-Walking-to-My-Car-Without-a-Bra Edition.”

If you didn’t catch that first part, a neurotic redhead and her gay best friend have moved in together, THEY WROTE A SHOW ABOUT IT ONCE, but we are funnier. Our apartment consists of one half of our landlady’s house, except it’s not REALLY her house, it’s like, her friend’s house. But he’s either in jail, or in Colorado. It’s all quite shady, you see. All I know about the landlady is that she likes the rent to be paid in cash, and that she has a cat. I know this because one weekend it would not stop its pitiful meowing and I had convinced myself that it had fallen into the air ducts.

Turns out, it was just in heat.

Matt and I don’t have a living room and we don’t have cable, so we often set up my macbook on the kitchen table and stream horror movies on Netflix while we roast $40 of organic root vegetables from the co-op that I forgot to cancel that week. Sometimes we get drunk on weekdays. Sometimes we get stoned and lie in bed and watch The Simpsons. But when we retreat to our bedrooms at night, he always says, “Goodnight, Barbra,” and I always say, “Goodnight, Judy.”

CAREER: I work in the marketing department of an engineering firm, which means I’m often writing direct mail pieces about DR2 grants and updating your community’s parks and recreation master plan. I know more about wastewater treatment than any twenty-something girl should. Also, engineers HATE COMMAS.

My Dream Du Jour is still to write and produce for CBS Sunday Morning, an aspiration I can pinpoint to one story Serena Altschul did on a british guy who sold vegetable peelers on the streets of New York.

Also because apparently I am a 55-year-old gay man in a 27-year-old straight woman’s body, because who watches CBS Sunday Morning?

MISCELLANIA: I wake up late. I use dry shampoo a lot. I often dress like I fell into your crazy great-aunt’s wardrobe trunk. I spend my money on used vinyl and malbec. I drive a hand-me-down Buick. On the weekends, I basically act as a squatter at a northside apartment to do laundry and watch cable television.

I have really, really bad insomnia. I think I’m going to take up the clarinet again. I recently illegally downloaded Rosetta Stone’s “Polish: Level I.” Polish is hard, yo! My New Year’s resolution is to slow dance more.

I still fall in love too easily. But I’m getting better.

On New Year’s Eve, I was waiting to get served at the bar when the gentleman behind me complimented my dress. After I thanked him, he said, “You’re going to completely devastate somebody, you know that?”

I smiled over my shoulder and said, “I can only hope.”

Handsome black neighbor (the one who is MUSCULAR. the one who sometimes stands in his bathroom, at night, with the shades open, clad only in a towel, while we gaze at him like those horny office women from that 90s Diet Coke commercial) was outside while I was lugging in my suitcase.

I considered, for a split second, feigning a real struggle with my luggage. DAMSEL-IN-DISTRESS.

“Jenn, seriously,” I thought. “What would Gloria Steinem think of that?”

Not skipping a beat, the little devil on my shoulder exclaimed, “Did you ever think Gloria Steinem just wants you to GET LAID?”

Of course, I manned up and hauled the suitcase into my apartment, but I made sure to look damn sexy doing it. (Read: NOT AT ALL.)