I completed my first week in a 'proper' job. A job what a grown-up might have. That, in itself, is kind of freaking me out. See, every other role I've ever been paid to perform has been expressly for slackers and/or man-children only. Not for people that have obligations and career goals. IBM was a bit 'hey you! Come work for us, you dynamic young go-getter you! We're, like, totally for professionals and that!' but that was all bluster used to draw us in before we actually started. In reality, as an 'industrial trainee' I was basically the 'general dogsbody'. I may have been an appreciated dogsbody but a dogsbody nonetheless and so that doesn't really count as being a grown-up. Before that, I worked part-time in a school art department where I was mostly cutting A3 pieces of sugar paper into A4 pieces of sugar paper. It was, as I'm sure you can imagine, fairly demanding. Occasionally I'd have to deal with kids being sassy and 15-year-old boys getting crushes on me (sometimes simultaneously) but that was pretty much as tough as it got. Even if I did it with the idea of 'gaining experience for my C.V.' for the vague plan I had of becoming an Educational Psychologist, it wasn't like there were any illusions of grandeur accompanying the role itself. Not unless you count faffing around with clay particularly 'high-powered'. (For the record, I don't). I also managed to reach the heady heights of 'trainee keyholder' at MVC after my mini-breakdown upon breaking up with the love of my life and dropping out of art school (although, who hasn't dealt with depression by entering the world of low-level retail management? It's pretty standard really), but that certainly wasn't a particularly ambitious role. The only thing that changed from when I had been a mere 'sales assisstant' previously, was that I was allowed to cash up at the end of the day. That was freaking awesome. Counting money, getting paperwork in order, making column A tally up with what column B says column A should have in it (although I hate maths my control freakery dictates I will love anything where you get to make things perfectly balance). However, even then, my manager at the time made me feel like I was a kid who'd been allowed to stay up later than usual, not that I was actually worthy of any extra responsibilities.
However, this job I somehow (and LORD knows how) have now, IS kind of respectable, it IS imbued with a certain degree of responsibility. It was bizarre to look at the organisation chart for our department and see that my allocated pay-grade level is the same as the team leader, and just one notch below what my manager is getting. I'm probably not earning anything like what they get as they've been there longer, have more experience, and are of course 'grown-ups' (and grown-ups get paid well. It's science. And I am not a grown-up ergo they MUST be better paid than I). (Although, let me just make this clear, I doubt anyone there, least of all me, is going home and lighting up cigars with £50 notes, or diving into mounds and mounds of big dollar-bucks ala Scrooge McDuck. I'm working for the muthafugging council, not some hedge fund institution).
But there it is, me: approaching some approximation of adulthood. That's me, someone who has an innate fear of grown-ups. I don't mean anyone over the age of 18, age may have a general correlation with 'grown-upness' but is by no means a guarantee of it's existence. I'm talking about those people that have it all generally worked out (even if 'having it worked out' just means they've just accepted their fate). Those people with mortgages and steady relationships, who take weekend breaks in the Lake District and don't get called 'baby noodle' by their mother. Those sorts who know where their next few paychecks are coming from and that's enough for them to be content, them what usually (but not always) have children and can discuss the merits and failings of the local schools (more to the point, they know where all the local schools are). They probably don't while away hours on facebook playing trivia games for their latest televisual obsession, or come home from the pub on Friday nights, smoke up, watch three episodes of Futurama and then get gently awoken at 3.30am by their friend Nick only to realise they've drooled a little on their pillow. That's just not how I imagine grown-ups live. Yet here I am, twenty-five years old and ostensibly a grown-up now. It won't last of course but, right now, in the present, I'm a grown-up doing a grown-ups job. Is this a situation I can expect to get used to? Even if it is, do I really want to?
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.
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