adult

How to Be an Adult: An Education

As a twenty-one-year old college student, I’m well aware that I’m still living in a bubble of parental care and structured life, even though I’m encouraged to act independently and take on responsibilities of my own. Still, once I graduate (in two and a half years) I will need to deal with a monster scarier than in any horror story you can imagine: the infamous Real World. I sometimes wonder if I’ll be able to handle it. I’ve decided that there should be a specific school that teaches how to be an adult. Here are the courses I imagine:

-How to Manage Your Money 101 (a required course for the following electives: How to Be Frugal Without Being Stingy; The Bare Essentials: What Are They?; How to Take a Vacation Without Regretting it Forever; and the ever-popular How to Pay Off Your Student Loans.)

-Being Single (a required course for the following electives: How to Know When It’s Time to Break Up; How to Dump Your Partner with Kindness, Courtesy, and Minimal Ego-Damage; How to Survive Rejection; Bars, Beaches and Bowling Alleys: Meeting People; The Online Dating Scene: Going Digital)

-Tax Returns and Living Alone: Life Skills (a required course for the following electives: Leaving Home: Tragedy or Jubilation?; A Corner of One’s Own: Living with Roommates; How to Pay Taxes Without Tears; I Rented an Apartment: Now What?; Health Insurance: Step by Step; Robbers and Rapists and Muggers, Oh My – Getting Past First-Time-Out-of-the-Nest-Paranoia)

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Stone

Grey stone worn thin
By the thousands who’ve
Walked upon it.
Innocent children,
Unaware of the hurt they inflict.
Adolescents,
In all their subconscious sadism,
Damaging a-purpose.
Apologetic adults,
Guilt nibbling at the edges of their beings,
Though always pushed away
By the knowledge of necessity.

Grey stone worn thin-
Wordless shout emitting from every crack,
Soundless scream of pain at each step,
Enduring,
Forever enduring,
With no will or way to end the suffering.
Comfort comes from one source only-
The familiarity of the pain.

Adult Fun!

Before you become alarmed – this is strictly PG-rated stuff, nothing beyond, despite what the title may bring forth in your imaginations.

As many of you know, I’m nineteen years old. Young by any standards. I’ll never claim to have more life experience than I have, but I also know that I’m relatively mature and that I’ve changed greatly over the last few years of puberty, just as any teenager does. One of the things that constantly strikes me these days is the difference between what I consider “fun” today and what I considered “fun” years ago.

There are, of course, the obvious things: when I was little, I’d enjoy mundane things like riding the bus or going up and down an escalator. Today the things that thrill me are expensive [like snowboarding] or things that I know won’t thrill me forever but that do now because they’re new to me [like driving].

But the thing that really makes me pause in amazement is the way I spend time with friends. While once upon a time we’d all enjoy just sitting around on a grassy knoll and exchanging jokes, now we like to actually do things together. Now we enjoy doing things that I considered to be “grown-up stuff” when I was little: we go to cafes, go out to dinner, go see movies often, go to museums, attend festivals. It’s astounding to me how different a simple thing like talking with a friend can be when one does it with a cheery cafe in the background or around a dinner table. There’s no real reason I can see for the change in pattern – it all boils down to the same thing, spending time with friends – but it’s a welcome and enjoyable change, nevertheless.

Voice and Tense

I realized today something that I’ve realized many times before, something which gets me more excited about college than ever – I need to learn how to write. What I mean is that I need to really study and practice in an orderly fashion, with someone to read my work and tell me that “this is good” and “this is bad” and “this needs some more work.” I love this blog, and I’m proud of myself for keeping it up – my track record on keeping organized blogs is disastrous, to say the least. The fact that I’m keeping this one up is due to my true devotion and love of practicing my writing.

But, as I was saying, I need to study and learn methods for it. The reason I realized this today was because I was spending my time at work, as I usually do, with trying to plan a new story. This new story is a sort of young-adult type thing, something that I decided to try after remember how much I love Sarah Dessen’s books. I started writing about my character from the third-person point of view, but after a page or so I realized that it sounded wrong. It wasn’t what I’d pictured in my head.

So I changed the voice, and tried writing her from the first person point of view: her speaking about herself. Once again, it sounded wrong because I was using past tense, and it sounded like any second she would be lapsing into current events. I realized that I don’t know how to write past tense but make it sound like the present, and not like the retelling of a story.

And so, whether or not I major in creative writing, I’m definitely going to take some writing courses when I go to college. I can’t wait!

On a completely unrelated subject – I find it highly amusing that WordPress, a blogging website, highlights the word “blog” as a misspell in its spell-checker program. WordPress is another word that is listed as misspelled.