Reflections on a Quarter Century

I'd clearly been meaning to write this post for a while, since it's nigh on 2 years now since I've stopped being 25 - and that is part of what reminded me; my birthday is coming up soon. Thus, late being often better than never, I still wanted to record what I still remember wanting to say about the remarkable amount of life change I had at the quarter-century mark:

• Graduated from college (grad school, to be precise)
• Visited a bunch of family I either hadn't seen for a long time, or, in a couple of cases, never met before
• Moved to a new state (not that I hadn't moved to very different states a few times in the past)
• Got a real job at a large, fast-moving company, having never done anything besides tutor/TA and sometimes help my dad work on houses - huge contrast to any previous experiences (only similar thing previously was my Google internship)
• Bought a real car (not that I didn't love my Mazda in its own way)
• Bought a townhouse - boy, was that a big one
• Corollary: first time being a real landlord (and not just the tenant who happened to remain longer)
• Got my first grownup boyfriend (anybody want to comment that as soon as I got out of school and had a range of ages to choose from, I started dating much older guys? I think that was just luck, really, though, and certainly shouldn't reflect badly on anyone before that...)

It's not like there weren't plenty of substantial things before that (24: First real-job-type internship (Google), first time to Burning Man; numerous moves between states and even countries in the 5 years before that) or after (26: First involvement in a legal action - I tried to take a guy to small claims for not paying rent - wound up not being able to serve him because I couldn't find any valid contact for him; first promotion at my real job), but... the sheer number of things that happened while 25 is rather striking. Maybe that's why car insurance changes at 25 - does this statistically work out to be a turning point age for a lot of people? Are there so many people who aren't out of school until 25? It was, in many ways, really entering the real world - growing up, even - to the extent I think that's a good thing ;-)