How Old Am I?

You know at carnivals, those booths where the carny is supposed to guess your age or weight or birthday, and if he gets it wrong you get a prize? I think I need to go to those more often. I'd have a real racket going. Why? Well, quite simply, because nobody can ever figure out how old I am.

I admit, I can see where it would be baffling. I have the face and haircut of a six year old, but I tend to go in for tramp-ish clothes and I don't really act like an 18-year-old. (I don't mean that like, "cause I'm sooo beyond my years". It's actually more of an "I'm really wierd" thing.) But come on, people! On average, not only do people get my age wrong, they get my age ridiculously wrong. And it's not just that I look younger or older than my age. Half the time I get mistaken for a junior high kid, the other half of the time, people think I'm 23.

A few examples:

• I was at the grocery store trying to buy cigarettes. When the checkout girl scanned them, she gave me a look like, "yeah, right, dumbass," and asked how old I was. I told her I was 18. She gave me The Look again and asked to see some ID. After I produced picture identification, she began apologizing profusely, explaining that she'd mistaken me for a "little kid in school".
• I was talking to a friend of my brother's who I had never met before. I mentioned something about my job. He asked if I was old enough to work. I was like, "yeah..." He looked confused for a minute, then said, "Oh, wait... are you older than Nick?" (My brother Nick, I should mention, was 15 at the time. I was 18.)
• Various times while I was living in Hamburg: I'd meet a cute twentysomething guy in a club and start talking to him. It would all be good until he figured out how old I was, at which point he would splutter, "You're only eighteen?" Then he'd start acting all fraternal, ask me if I was sure I wasn't drinking too much and/or would be ok in the "rough neighborhood" of St. Pauli, and then go to look for girls in their age group. Grrr. (To be fair, not all of them minded the barely-legal thing, and one of them even minded it so little that we hooked up, went out for a month, and then broke up when it came out that, oh, by the way, he was Norman Bates-ish-ly wierd about women. Whoops.)
• I was on a smoke break at work when a creepy old guy came up and started trying to hit on me. I dropped a few hints that I was, um, not a member of his target demographic, which he ignored. Finally, I managed to work a direct mention of my age into the conversation, which made him recoil and all but run away. Serves you right, Humbert Humbert.

So, just for the record, people... I am eighteen. Not fourteen, not twenty-six. Eighteen. (However, if you are by any chance a vendor of alcohol, feel free to mistake me for a 21-year-old. It's all good. Really. I won't mind.)