"Ohmigosh I think I'm going to have a breakdown."

"You'll be fine."

"No, I won't. I'm old now."

"Old?! You're only 25!"

"Right! I'm 25! Tweeenty-fiiive! I've lived a quarter of a century now, and it's all downhill from here."

My friends and I are hitting (or have hit) mid-mid-life. Quarter-Life.

(Well, technically, Quarter-Life would be something like 20 if the average life expectancy is 80, right? But 25 is such a nice round number.)

What exactly happens at Quarter-Life?

Wild keg parties turn into sophisticated cocktail parties. Insurance and 401K plans start to become important. And your single friends begin to drop like flies into the fires of—gulp—marriage.

Yup. The dreaded M word. The word that's claimed many a good man, snaring him away from bars and strip clubs, never to be heard from again.

"We lost another one," is the sad lament us guys mutter to one another every time we hear of another buddy blowing the standard two-to-three months salary on a rock.

Then comes the sad realization that the Best Years of your life, a.k.a. College, are long gone.

Sure, you can try to recapture them with a night of binge drinking before you hit the clubs. But then you see a sea of Britney Spears-look-alikes and you seriously wonder if it's legal to stare at their tight bottoms like that.

And you can't help but feel your age when you're amidst such a sea of young blood. It's as if there's been a changing of the guard and the new ranks have moved in.

Then you find yourself seeking out the older clubs, the ones that occasionally play 80's music, and you feel better.

For some, this may seem depressing.

But me, I'm gonna hold out as long as I can. I ain't gonna let Quarter-Life get me down, dammit, even if I'm 26 now as I write this.

"You're only as old as you think you are."

Now that's a saying that I really like. Age is relative; it's all in your mind. I can shake this Quarter-Life thing. Mind over matter, mind over matter.

Then again, I just went to my first cocktail party this weekend and have been throwing money into 401Ks for the last few years.

Drat. So maybe Quarter-Life IS rearing its ugly head in my face already. Dammit. I'm old now. I'm going to stop writing this now and go have a breakdown.

. . .

Have you had a quarter-life breakdown?