Growing pains me

Real life has crept up on me and I feel like I am actually beginning adulthood now. I’m in my Twenties Proper. Twenty-one didn’t count, because I was at university, and then I graduated and went on a holiday I couldn’t afford, and to a festival I couldn’t afford, and dossed around a lot even though I couldn’t afford to do that. That moving-to-London-and-running-out-of-money thing happened too.

I visited my friend Hannah one night this week. I could only stay for a few hours because she has an even more proper job now and had to go to bed at a sensible time. It’s one of those jobs where she has to actually go to an office and sit in it, doing a job, from 9-5, Monday to Friday.

I’m still working from home.

You know when they – the people older than you – said that your school days are the best of your life? You didn’t believe that being picked on, made to take your shirt off in P.E. even though you thought your body looked like a potato, and dating girls because you didn’t want to make yourself even more of a target could actually be anything other than the pile of shit it felt like. But they might have been right.

I don’t get to sit in dingy rooms hung with throws with my best friends, smoking weed and watching something weird on TV, and eating my Saturday job wages in junk food until the munchies go away any more. I guess I could do that but then everyone’d be late for work the next day. It’s not like school when we could decide how we feel about going to lessons today every day and most of the time decide that, you know what, we don’t really feel like it so let’s just go and get some chips and a Coke, and smoke a bit ’round our friend’s place, yeah? Yeah.

Things are changing, and they’re changing so quickly that it’s difficult to keep up. Change is good, but change is hard, and it takes some effort.

Some things I have to make the effort to do within the foreseeable future are:

  1. Apply for better-paid jobs
  2. Finish this TEFL thing I’ve started and not done much about in the last fortnight
  3. Think some more about my life and what I might do with it
  4. Clean the flat

P.S. It’s been a while. I ran out of things to say, so I didn’t say them.