23 Reasons Blink 182 Was Right: Nobody Likes You When You're 23

1.) That ambiguous time between your early twenties and your mid twenties. Ew.

2.) College is over, but in this economy, it's not very likely that the rest of your life has started.

3.) Broke broke broke. Food is expensive. Beer is expensive. Life is expensive.

4.) Walking the line between angsty teen and responsible adult is really hard.

5.) Your friends all start getting engaged and getting married. Because that's clearly the next step toward growing up. This causes much anxiety when you are not even close to ready to settle down.

6.) If you've never seen the world, this is when wanderlust settles around you like a little fog you can barely see anything else through. It's born of the vague, angsty dissatisfaction not quite being a grown up brings.

7.) Champagne tastes. Beer Budget. Familial financial support is cut back on the road to financial independence. This makes it hard to buy those cute shoes in the window at Macy's.

8.) No one cares that you graduated from college in 3 years with a 3.9. No one.

9.) Your friends are very likely just as vaguely dissastisfied as you are. Therefore, making them less than fun to hang out with.

10.) You experience the biggest round of growing pains since kindergarten around this time and that takes a toll on even the most put-together, successful 23-year-old.

11.) In the absence of a real job in the recession, you probably have to pick up a cruddy job. Like working for a salon and spa for rich little girls. Or selling popcorn to tourists. It's a hard life, but it pays the bills.

12.) You have to learn how to do your own laundry. I successfully did not do a load of laundry until I was almost 22. At 23, I had to start learning the finer points of separating and using different soaps and drying certain things outside of the dryer.

13.) You have to learn how to cook. The grown up inside of you is no longer satisfied with doritos and easy mac. So you have to find recipes, devote time to preparation, cooking, experimenting. And sometimes your efforts are less than successful (e.g. -- salsa chicken. ew. not to be confused with chicken salsa. which is a gift from god.)

14.) Sometimes you don't get what you want. This is where that cataclysmic crumbling of everything you thought was going to happen after college that you've been plotting and planning since you were ten falls down around your head and you have to start over again.

15.) You have to make your own doctor's appointments, take your own sick days, pick up your own prescriptions.

17.) You have to buy your own groceries and clothes; le sigh.

18.) Laugh lines.

19.) Credit cards and scores become scary and loom over your every financial move.

20.) No one understands you. No one.

21.) You have to make a serious decision about what you want to be when you grow up which weighs on you at the gym, when you are picking out ground turkey and riding the bus to visit friends from work.

22.) Jealousy rears its little green head alllll the time.

23.) The combination of these factors make you miserable. And whiny. And teary. And it's hard.

Therefore, I'm very excited that I'm not 23 anymore :)