I write to you in anticipation of a somber occasion. My twenties will pass into the great beyond on November 20, 2019, aged 10.
In elegiac celebration, I ask that you gather on November 15. In the spirit of my twenties’ life – often unhealthy, vaguely acidic, menaced by the inscrutable popularity of something orange and sinister – I will be ordering Panda Express. If you can, please bring a libation or foodstuff of your choosing.
Some memories:
My twenties were born on a cold Massachusetts night in late 2009. It was a time of bleary-eyed optimism and collegiate bloviating. Our recently elected president, Barack Obama, was well on his way to uniting the nation, and we young people knew that polarization and political conflict would soon be a thing of the past. Country ingénue Taylor Swift had only recently had her VMA speech interrupted by Kanye West. Everyone was watching the first season of Glee. The Four Loko craze was still a year away.
On their first day, my twenties showed up late to class due to a sore throat, but later decided to board a bus to New Haven to attend the Harvard-Yale game. This foreshadowed the excellent decision-making that would characterize the remainder of my twenties’ lifespan.
My twenties’ early years had the hallmarks of a typical infancy: howling and sleeping at inappropriate times; an aversion to vegetables but a fondness for bottles; and a near-total dependence on parental largesse. As they reached toddlerhood, my twenties longed to make their own way, and decided to pursue employment in the sexiest of industries: business-analytic enterprise software. This required a bold relocation, south of the Mason-Dixon Line, to a coastal city known as Washington, D.C.
The following three years would be the only time in my twenties in which I had my own dishwasher, and they were truly magical. Relishing my newfound status, my twenties promptly ruined it by growing a ponytail. The first year in D.C. was also the only year my twenties spent not enrolled in a degree-granting program – a period later referred to as the “Era of Good Feelings.”
Shortly before their fifth birthday, my twenties got a little too excited while attending the Joint Statistical Meetings, and decided to apply to Ph.D. programs. What might have been a youthful misapprehension rapidly escalated to a serious case of the GREs, owing almost entirely to the unwillingness of friends and family to talk me out of it. A year later, my twenties found themselves in an apartment complex called Rains in the midst of a California drought. The remainder of their days would be spent living in that third-floor, double-occupancy room.
In the first California year, my twenties would learn of sigma algebras, UMVUEs, and martingales; friends and family reported only a modest contemporaneous decrease in my likability. Shortly before turning seven, my twenties were deemed “qualified,” after which they spent several years frequently misspelling their chosen statistical area as “casual inference.”
In their senescent era, my twenties developed an unhealthy fixation with politics and a crippling dependency on podcasts. My twenties were best known for creating and managing several trends: ever-increasing insomnia, offset by ever-increasing quantities of coffee, offset by ever-increasing consumption of Tums (doctors tell me that, near the end, my twenties were mostly a caffeinated mass of calcium carbonate).
Despite their short life, my twenties taught many lessons. Carry Advil. Never fly Basic Economy. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. Examples include: eating a frozen Eggo straight from the freezer; fitting a neural net to a dataset; pursuing a doctorate. Perhaps most importantly: life is nasty, brutish, delightful, weird, utterly hilarious, and best spent in good company.
My twenties are survived by my thirties, who ask that in lieu of flowers, you send rosés.
In melancholic remembrance,
Evan
PS: This invite was adapted from an article in the New York Times.
PPS: “Significant” others welcome, as long as they still qualify after a correction for multiple testing (Bonferroni preferred, but Benjamini-Hochberg accepted).