Ten Minutes to Midnight
An excerpt from ‘Drivel: Deliciously Bad Writing by Your Favorite Authors,’ edited by Julia Scott
At ten minutes to midnight on October 26, 2000, I walked out on the balcony of my dorm room in Paris with a notebook. I was living in Paris for my junior year abroad, and I remember the streets were quiet and dark — the perfect setting for what was to come.
In ten minutes, I would turn twenty — a birthday I had been waiting for for so long that the moment itself felt too momentous to ignore. (I was also in the midst of a full-blown existential crisis — very Parisian — and had been awake, tossing and turning, on each dark night that year). So feel free to picture me as I was that night, a virginal nineteen-year-old in my flannel nightgown, alone and shivering on a balcony with a notebook and facing the last night of her teenage years. Here is what I wrote. –J.S.
10/26/00 — 11:50pm
I am about to write a paragraph of HYPOCRISY, because although I am about to write that I attach no significance whatsoever to my 20th birthday, this is belied by the fact that I am desperately writing about it in the last moment of my “adolescence.”
But it’s true — I could care less about my birthday. Birthdays themselves are as arbitrary as the dates and hours that were invented to hold time in the hot hand of humanity.
The number “20” is as meaningless as the hour I fixed at the top of this entry. And any significance I attach to it is socially constructed. This fact was reinforced by the sudden realization, while standing by the window and waiting for midnight to arrive, that my birthday had already begun in North America!
If I MUST attach any significance to an artificial number that indicates neither a “phase” nor a “milestone,” I would say that, taking it at face value, it indicates a new set of experiences to be had. To use the term “the twenties” — the twenties have GOT to be better than the “teens.” That is why I am happy to age, to definitively (at least from the point of view of OTHERS who attach importance to “20”), say that those years are behind me.
Why not use “20” as a jumping-off point for a happier, healthier Julia?
At the same time, in contemplating the fact that I have been on this earth for twenty human years, I become unbelievably hopeless. Twenty years, within the course of nature’s history, is dust. It’s dust on dust.
It’s atoms on dust on dust.
And yet, for my “20” years, I feel as though I haven’t yet read enough, haven’t thought or felt enough. I should have a chef d’oevre to show for it by now, shouldn’t I, or a least be very, very wise?
I feel like I’m not SEEING enough. Where are the moments of absolute suffering and joy that complement each other in a cycle of happiness and pain, love and hate?
I want to experience LIFE viscerally, but at the same time step back and think about it all. Most of all, I’m afraid that in the coming years all my midnight scribblings will come to nothing, and are just the self-centered scratches of someone who knows of no other way to lend significance to her life.
From the book Drivel: Deliciously Bad Writing by Your Favorite Authors. Copyright © 2014 by Julia Scott. Reprinted by permission of Perigee Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
Julia Scott is a radio producer, journalist, and essayist. Her work has been collected in Best American Science Writing. Her stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Modern Farmer, Nautilus, Salon, and on PRI’s Marketplace and the BBC World Service. She is the editor of Drivel: Deliciously Bad Writing By Your Favorite Authors.
