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.

A post for a post’s sake

It’s been a while now since I’ve posted. I’m asking myself whether quantity or quality is the more important. Of course the answer is ‘quality’, but I can’t just write nothing. I have to do something. If I give myself too much of a break I’ll begin telling myself that there’s no point carrying on and that people already know I’m unreliable and uninteresting so I needn’t bother trying. I just don’t have any developed ideas right now. I’ve been thinking over a handful of things but I’ve not had the time to consider them properly. If I sit down and just start writing about one then I’m liable to miss out some key points that later I’ll wish I’d got in there to begin with.

I have turned twenty-two since I last posted. I was born on the twenty-ninth of November, nineteen-ninety. It was a cold day (it was November), and my mother was screaming (probably), and my father was crying (probably). North Tyneside General Hospital is the setting. I came out of my mum and I was fine and I went home with my parents and everything’s been pretty much all right all the way until almost the end of twenty-twelve. If I were either of my parents I would be terrified by the fact that it were even possible to have a son in his twenties. They probably are terrified, actually. In fact, I know that my dad is because he told me so, or at least said something to me to that effect. He’ll turn fifty-one tomorrow. My grandfather was fifty when Dad married my mum. Dad was twenty-three. He says he remembers him (that’s my grandfather) as being an old man on the day of his wedding. I don’t see my parents as old. (Mum isn’t yet fifty. She has roughly seven months of her forties left to her.) I see them as in a sort of undefined stretch of life. Both still have young children, so maybe that’s what makes them so hard to define. We’re no longer the nuclear family, and our definitions haven’t quite been set in stone just yet.

My dad says that now I need to sort myself out. I need to cut my hair and change my image, he says. I won’t. Not for now. It’s taken a long time to settle into myself and I don’t want to uproot everything again just as I’ve breathed a sigh of relief at just being me. I don’t want to give up on my dreams (excuse America’s influence) already. There are things I want to do. One of them is not to get stuck in a life that is going to make me miserable. Wouldn’t it be so fucking simple to do things with our lives that we actually enjoy? So few of us manage it. We’re all so skilfully led into the pen that is a career. In we go, and on we plod until we reach the man with the stun gun who knocks us on the head with it so that we’ve no idea what the fuck is going on but we’re still essentially living beings, and then Death is looming and as he’s nearing we’re bleeding out over the floor and after a bit of a shake we’re dead.

I’m sure I’m covering old ground here, but I am so scared. My life is sitting on the road in front of me and I just want to crawl back into the warm den where Mum and Dad and all the other adults were such mysterious beings, doing their adult things like ‘meetings’ and ‘work’ and ‘taxes’ whilst I fiddled around at their ankles with a pencil and some card, oblivious to what lay ahead. They were so rich that they could buy cars and houses and masses of things to keep in them. They’d stay up late and talk about secret things in semi-whispers, and sometimes they’d slip into broken Welsh to disguise the mysterious grown-up conversation topics as I fell asleep to their deep voices amongst the big feet beneath the table.

I’m considering teaching. I have always said I do not want to be a teacher. It’s beginning, isn’t it?