Monday, September 20, 2010

And I'm Halfway to 40...

So, I remember when I turned 25 and Amber (in all seriousness) told me that I was halfway to 30... of course, it only took a few seconds for all of us in the vicinity to bust out laughing (including Amber) at the silliness of what had just been said.
Twenty-five and the world is ahead of you. Not really a care in the world... except those damn debt collectors who wouldn't stop calling me. God, that really is the most annoying thing in the world (on a side note, I'd like to offer an apology to all those who had to endure those years of phone calls for me... yeah, I'm super sorry about that). But aside from that, not really much in the way of caring about anything.

Thirty-five and things are a little different. Hell, they're a LOT different. There are no more annoying phone calls (at least I got that part figured out), but there is also no more time. No more time to not care about anything. No more time to hang out and do nothing. No more time to find the kid in you. There are too many other things to worry about. There's a mortgage, the bills (that you pay to keep those assholes from calling you), there's work, there's school, there's yard work (which I have woefully neglected), there's trying to take time out to be a good friend, there's homework, there's the car payment, and there's stress... the stress of trying to figure out how to balance it all and still have enough time to just be me.

I know the school thing is adding to that stress and it is only temporary... but when that's done, then what? There's going to be new jobs and new adventures that will pull away from all the other things that make this already delicate balance even more tenuous.

I used to think that people who had 'mid-life' crises were just being self-absorbed babies. They were just selfish and narcissistic jerks who bought sports cars and spent their time ditching everything that was important to them. I thought I was above ever going through any kind of emotion about getting older... I think I was wrong...

I'm not sure when it hit me... maybe it was last week when I realized that I was about to be 35 and I was sitting at my desk peeling stickers off of bottles... probably wouldn't have been so bad if it were a rare occasion, but it's not. I do the most menial tasks every day in the hopes that I can keep a job I don't even really like anymore. Thirty-five years old, workin' for the man, trying to make a living that is barely that and hating every minute of it. It's not that I hate working... It's just that I hate what I do, I hate that I'm really damn good at it, and I hate that I'm smart enough to know that I should never have been here to start with.

That's the thing, see... I know that I'm smart... too smart for this crap anyway. But with my 'intelligence' comes a level of stupidity that is unsurpassed my most. I wasted a lot of it... hell, up until the time I made the decision to go back to school, I damn near wasted all of it. I wish I had been smart enough to not waste my smarts.

That's my big regret. My only one really... all that other stuff that I've screwed up was just a learning experience. And I think it's all made me a pretty awesome person... and let's face it, I'm pretty freakin' awesome.

I just wish I could get past that whole wasting my talent thing. I told my mom last weekend that I'm pretty sure that if I had gone to culinary school when I originally wanted to and knowing what I know now about it, I probably would have screwed that up too... I wasn't mentally ready for it... I wasn't mature enough to handle the pressure... so in that sense, I guess that wasn't so bad, but still, it doesn't change the fact that I'm 35 years old now with an IQ of 141 and it took me 34 years to figure out that I'm an idiot.

How's that for irony?