Blogger: Padraic Maroney – “The Neurotic Urban Millennial”
This weekend is a holiday people love to hate. It’s St. Patrick’s Day; the one day of the year when everyone is Irish.
While St. Patrick’s Day is a source of pride for the Irish, it also just gives everyone else a reason to get drunk and be ridiculous. In Philadelphia, for the two weekends before the holiday, we have the Erin Express, where twenty-somethings are transported from bar to bar to drink copious amounts of green beer and puke all over the city. Much like New Year’s Eve, it gives people an excuse to get drunk and make bad decisions.
In case you can’t tell from my name, I am basically a leprechaun. Want further proof? I was apparently born with red hair, and to listen to my mother tell the story, when they took me to get my first haircut, the red went away and grew back dirty blonde. It was more traumatic to her than me, as she was the one left in tears from the incident. During the summer, I still get a ginger tint to both my hair and beard.
A few years ago, my aunt did a DNA test. To her dismay, it came back that she was only 49% Irish. Being Irish has been so baked into our family DNA that she had been hoping for at least 51%. Apparently, no one in my family is worried about being arrested for being a serial killer, because this past year my brother and mother also got their DNA tested. It says that my siblings and I are a little over 41% Irish.
But on a personal level, St. Patrick’s Day has also been special to me for another reason. The reason? As a kid, my dad always treated the holiday as a second birthday for me complete with greeting cards and presents.
In third grade, I received a grey Huffy splatter paint bike. It’s basically the best present that I ever received.
All of this is to show how important the holiday is to my family. This year, I’m giving it a different significance because I am requesting a mulligan. Each year that I complete another spin around the sun, I take stock of everything and plot out the next year. However, since my birthday, it’s been a rough six months. Along with my well documented “injury,” there’s been some family issues, and I somehow got the neverending ebola that was going around and lasted for almost two months.
As I write this, I am down for the count again, with what I can only describe as what male menstrual cramps must feel like. Since taking my digital detox last month, I’ve also found going back on social media to be mentally exhausting. I find reading comments on articles or Facebook posts too much to handle. I can’t even find some dumb enjoyment from it because everything ends up triggering hostility.
So, for my “half birthday,” I’m starting over. The irony of this happening during Lent isn’t lost on me. But, I am going to leave all of the bad stuff from the last six months behind and start fresh.
I’m doing this because, possible menstrual cramps aside, I have noticed (especially in the last month or so) that it’s all begun to wear on me. Physically, my body is tight and feeling out of whack. A friend recently did some kind of back massage function to me and I reacted so loudly, that I am surprised some little old lady didn’t ask to have what I was having.
Mentally, my fuse has become much shorter. The euphoria from my detox has worn off and between worrying about things and constantly trying to keep everything afloat, I’m mentally exhausted.
The near depletion of my mental and physical wherewithal has also led to an emotional depletion. I’ve found myself unwarrantedly snapping at people and dumb things on TV and movies have started to cause emotional reactions, when they haven’t ever before.
So, I am just loudly proclaiming that I can’t continue this way. The little gold eye masks, which I have started using because my friends like to round up all of our ages to being 40 (despite the fact that I am nearly a half-decade away), aren’t strong enough to hold off the wear and tear of life. Rather than every weekend being filled with appointments, responsibilities, errands, and attempting to keep my apartment from looking like an episode of Hoarders, I would relish being able to just say fuck it, and go grab a meal at Arby’s.
So, rather than continuing down this path and hoping for a change to magically happen, I am taking matters into my own hands. Come next Monday, it’s a brand new day and, oh yes, I will get one (or two) of those tasty sandwiches.
Padraic Maroney hails from upstate New York, suffering from middle child syndrome. His writing career began after moving to the Philadelphia suburbs while in high school. He wrote for The Bucks County Courier Times’ Reality section, written by local teenagers, and has the distinction of writing a weekly gossip column for a college newspaper at a school he didn’t even attend! His love of pop culture led him to intern at Teen People, where he met Janis Gaudelli, and realized he could turn being a millennial into a career. Since then he’s alternated between writing and marketing, but always focused on Millennials and everything they bring to the table. Padraic is a lover of shenanigans, 80s music, and the movie “Scream.”
You can follow his additional adventures on Instagram: @padraicjacob