Living the cliché

I'm going to be twenty-five in little over a month. Twenty-fucking-five y'all. That's... that's literally insane. I'm twenty-five and thanks to a series of hilarious misadventures over the last few months I'm 'Living The Dream (2007)*' by:

- Moving back in with my parents.
- Having no job.
- Having no car.
- Having no boyfriend.

This is it guys. I've ended up becoming the poster girl for 'how not to live your life when you leave university'.

According to the diary my sixteen year-old self kept** I was supposed to have escaped this one-horse town ages ago. I was supposed to be a 'singer' (erm... I must have written that particular life list for the two weeks I had an ear infection and couldn't hear well enough to realise singing was not a skill I was ever going to be able to rely on to provide me with an income, although I had added the caveat that if that hadn't worked out then being an educational psychologist was an acceptable runner up prize: Plan B's, reassuring the Sazz since 1998). I was supposed to have my own fabulous house which was filled with rather fabulous things (from the bits of magazines I'd cut out presumably that would include polka-dots and posters of Joel-off-of-Neighbours... sadly, looking around my room in it's current incarnation that's not a million miles from the truth - although that life-sized Joel-off-of-Neighbours cut out was a beeatch to find). I seem less bothered about the being married with kids although apparently it's only okay for the singer thing to have not worked out if I've managed to fall in love. Interesting. It's gratifying to know that even then I wasn't wholly enamored with the realities concerned with being in love, like setting up a home or whatever. I just prefer the general concept. Again, that's actually not that different to now.

To be fair I am working on at least two out of the four signifiers of loserdom and hope to have at least the job and the car sorted before I hit the big two-five. The 'not being part of the clichéd demographic of kids STILL draining their folks of money, food, and will to live'? Well, I need to sort my head out a bit first. As some of my readers may know the plan was to do a masters in Bristol. Actually the plan was to do a masters in Guildford. No, wait, the ORIGINAL plan was to be awesome. I should have just stuck with that. When you gona learn to trust those instincts Sazz? But, yeah, the masters thing, seemed like an expensive way of spending a year just to give myself a break from having to make any hard and fast decisions about the rest of my life. Call me crazy but I could probably go and become a barfly in Ibiza or something and achieve the same level of debt with just as many insights into how to get through the next few years of my existence. SO, instead, I'm going to do the sensible thing and take a step back rather than wildly push forward on a path that's taking me somewhere I don't really want to go. I mean, that path is perfectly lovely. There's trees on either side and cartoon woodland creatures who provide a nice line in witty repartee but it all comes out on an industrial estate in the middle of Slough. No-one wants to end up there. Even the poster girl for how not to live your life when you've finished university doesn't want to end up there. Especially because she forgot her jumper and it's quite chilly in winter.

Seriously though kids, giving myself space to think about the future with the added bonus of not having to eventually whore myself out to middle-aged guys that wear beige slacks and don't shower as often as they should seems like a good move.

The boyfriend bit? Hahahahahahahahahgfhdksfkdjb. Yeah. Trouble with that is, as Carlos pointed out when we were trying to figure out what the fuck I was going to be doing next year - I hate everyone and I'm rubbish at meeting new people. Now, he was saying this in the context of 'if you move in with a bunch of strangers you're going to have to make a stab at pretending to be someone nice [i.e. someone that isn't me] and converse with them occasionally for at least the first couple days of living there' but it works with explaining my single status too. See, there's not that many people in the world whose company I can stand for extended periods of time. There's even less people in the world who can stand MY company for extended periods of time. This somewhat lowers my success in the dating game. Added to this, I also have a gypsy curse on me that means I can never win at ANY games (for realz - be it a game of luck, skill, or dating... I will always inevitably lose. I don't know for sure that this is resultant of some gypsy curse but I can't think of any other explanations. Except that I'm just generally inept. At everything. I discard that option on the basis that I'd rather not make myself MORE suicidal). But anyway, as I said, boyfriend? Hahahahahahahahahgfhdksfkdjb.

In the meantime, in the absence of anything better to do downloading Will Oldham's back catalogue and the much-adored televisual delight Fist of Fun are keeping me reasonably distracted (for today at least). I have also started this online novel writing course and have received part one and two but have just realised (too late it would seem) that this is going to involve me sending off my 'novel' (if you can call it that. I'd rather you didn't else it'll start getting ideas above it's station) so that other people, PEOPLE WITH EYES, can READ it and give FEEDBACK *hyperventilates*. So I find myself here. Writing an extremely long and self-indulgent blog post (is there any other kind?) about my quarter-life crisis (which is a real phenomena apparently). This, my dear sweet friends, is what it is to be a cliché. To sum up, in a word... gah.

*© Plastictrayinc

**I think I may have discussed my enlightening-yet-disturbing bouts of nostalgia before - that would have been around the time I packed up all the shit at my folk's house, within the last week I've had the opportunity to go through all the same shit and UNpack it. That's how I roll. I think the worst of all the offending items is an art project entitled: 'The Worst Week of My Life: Summed up in Words, pictures, and lyrics' (gots to love the teenage hyperbole). If anyone ever sees this I will, literally, kill myself (and the person who's seen it) (I'll kill them first. Obviously. I'm not a mentalist). It was good in a sense as it gave me a startling reminder of why I ended up becoming an art school drop-out (oh yeah, I've been living the clichés for YEARS now baby. Keep up). It's because I ended up producing work like that, a person who produces work like that is not a person I want to be.