Remember being in grade school and your teacher had you write a letter to your future self? Remember how we all thought we'd be married and living in our own houses and making the huge sum of $25,000 by the time we were 21?

Well, we're older and wiser now, and we know that we don't have to be married by a particular age -- and for some of us, myself included, 21 was just too young to even consider being married. We know that making $25,000 a year means you're fairly dirt-poor, as much as that amount sounds to a little kid, and that's not even close to what you need to be making in order to afford your own house.

I thought being 23 would be a hard year. There's all those songs about 23 being bad. Incubus says, "A decade ago, I never thought I would be 23 on the verge of spontaneous combustion, woe is me." Dave Matthews says, "23 and so tired of life, such a shame to throw it all away." Turned out that for me, 24 was the worst, not 23.

So here I am. Nowhere near where I thought I'd be. And honestly, I'm really okay with that. I'm just taking things day to day, beat to beat and street to street.