Adulting is not what I thought it would be. I’ve been mis-sold.
Remember when you were a kid, and you couldn’t wait be a grown up? When it seemed like grown-ups got to make all the rules, eat whatever they wanted, do all the cool stuff, and stay up late reading any time they felt like it? I mean, being a kid sucked. All “turn out your light!” and “eat your sweet potato!” (I still refuse to eat sweet potato. It’s just wrong.) Once I was a grown-up, I was sure, I would read all the books, all the time, go swimming at midnight whenever I wanted, and never eat a sweet potato again.
Apparently I’m also doing being a grown-up wrong, because stock images think this is what it should look like.
I guess I got one thing right.
Being a grown-up is really, seriously overrated. It’s full of far too many things I don’t want to do. I mean, okay. I can not eat sweet potato, which is good, and while I may not eat all the cake, I eat a substantial quantity of it. But rather than going swimming at midnight, I’m grumbling if I’m not in bed by ten, and anyway it might be cold, and I’ll have to go to bed with wet hair, which means the pillow’ll be soaked, and…
And as for reading all the books, all the time – well, I would, if I didn’t have horrible grown-up things to do. Obviously I’d rather be reading (or writing) than doing pretty much anything else, but as an exhaustive list is beyond the scope of this blog, here are the ones that really annoy me.
I am possibly even less impressed by cleaning than this.
1. Cleaning
It’s 2018. Why do we not have self-cleaning houses? I mean, there are self-cleaning loos, and self-driving cars, and smart fridges that make shopping lists for you – why am I still dusting the house every week? I wouldn’t mind it so much if I could do it, say, twice a year. But I like stuff being clean, and while the SO and I are both generally tidy people, a soft covering of dust descends over everything at a startling pace. I half expect to get up in the morning and have to dust my eyebrows. Plus there’s the Little Furry Muse. How she’s not entirely bald (rather than just having a bald tummy), I don’t know. Within a day of cleaning, there are drifts of cat hair collecting in the corners of the hall. I try to ignore them, but by the middle of the week they’ve been joined by copious strands of my hair (I should really be bald, too, the amount that I seem to lose), and formed alarmingly large tumbleweeds that start patrolling the house and give you a fright if you come across one in the middle of the night. I think there’s a good chance they’d take over if I left it longer than a week between vacuums.
And that is a hard no from me. I do not iron. I refuse. Laundry is bad enough.
2. Laundry
If I was a slightly different person, I’d really be tempted by the whole naturist thing just because it seems it must really cut down on laundry. But, as I’m not, all I can do is be happy that the SO does his chef’s whites at work, so I only have to wash clothes once a week. Sheets and towels are okay (although changing the bed always involves an immense amount of procrastination when it comes to actually putting the new duvet cover on), but socks and underwear are ridiculous. There’s always so many of them! And unless Layla’s taken to covering her naked tummy with sports socks, there’s only the two of us. How do people with families cope? All that hanging out socks and taking in socks. This is why wearing shoes is overrated. Being barefoot takes an immense amount of hassle out of doing laundry.
Why yes. Watching you explain how to cut a courgette is fascinating, Frank.
3. Cooking
I love food. Food is a wonderful, wonderful thing, and for this reason I will always cook. I prefer baking, to be honest, because not only do you get a certain satisfaction in watching a cake rise or seeing the cookies come out of the oven all domed and brown and beautiful, you also get to lick the bowl or (and) eat a couple of cookies worth of dough while you’re at it. You know, if that’s your thing (and if it’s not, I don’t think we can be friends). But actually cooking – well, in one of my previous lives I cooked full time on a sailing catamaran. I may not have been entirely honest about my cooking skills when I got the job, and to start with I taught myself how to make seven days worth of breakfast, lunch, dinner and dessert, and stuck to them. I did eventually get better at it, and always took pleasure from the fact that the guests enjoyed the food, but since then I’ve not cooked much. These days I mostly make salads when the SO’s away, and occasionally throw a bunch of things in the slow cooker and cross my fingers. Most other dishes seem an awful hassle when a fresh baguette, some cheese and a bit of fruit pretty much tick all the food boxes I need.
Have I ever abandoned a trolley in the middle of the store and just gone home? Um, yes.
4. Shopping
I am not a shopper. A few times a year I’ll mission around some shops and get some new clothes, but I don’t really shop for pleasure. And food shopping – food shopping is the worst. I have to choose a day and build up to it, especially in summer. All these people, charging around and flinging food in their trolleys, fighting over the cheese like they expect the cows to be on strike for the next six months. Old ladies squeezing all the tomatoes. All of them. Small children screaming in the cake aisle. Impatient men digging through the spinach looking for some mythical perfect packet. And let’s not even talk about how it’s a law of the universe that whichever checkout I choose will have the chattiest cashier, plus the person who’s forgotten half a dozen things and keeps leaving and coming back.
One day I will have home delivery, and never go to a supermarket again.
And we honestly thought being a grown-up meant doing whatever we wanted…
What about you, lovely people? Do you have any adult responsibilities you particularly object to? What’s been the worst let-down about becoming a grown-up? Let me know below!
adulting, growing up, just for fun, life
1. No cat, no smoking and just me. I don’t actually have to dust very often, but I truly hate vacuum cleaning. I try to do it as little as possible.
2. The thing that makes a difference to laundry is a tumble dryer. Saves ever so much work. Duvet covers are of the devil, but the last two goes have been almost painless. I may have finally learned how to do it. Ironing is not to be contemplated.
3. I’m not a great cook, but I do like it. However, what I really like is people telling me how delicious it is. Cooking just for me hardly seems worth the effort. It needs applause.
4. Yes, home delivery is great! Although, you don’t get to choose the sell-by dates, so you end up having to use everything up by Thursday.
The worst thing about being an adult is having to go to work every day. It’s better than school, but this is a very low bar.
Vacuum cleaning *is* horrible. And I swear the effects don’t even last one afternoon around here. And yes to the tumble drier – much better for socks! But we don’t have one 🙁 And even when we have before, if it’s good weather I feel guilty using it. Sigh. Also, quite right about cooking needing appreciation – although then you also have to share, so, you know… *wobbles hand suspiciously* And I did try home delivery in the UK a few times. It was the substitutions that confused me. Since when is broccoli a decent alternative to sugar snap peas? I mean, I like broccoli, but…
And work. Yes. It cuts into reading and writing time dramatically. But anything’s better than school. *shudders*
That’s the best part of being young: so much expectations what to do when…. thinking (mistakenly) the other grass is greener, but forgetting the amount of manure it takes. Lovely days when all you had to worry about, was if you had brought the correct books when attending school.
Most chores should be delegated to house-elves.
But doing so or house delivery can grow into tunnel vision.
Working better than school? Right now, I’m daydreaming about going back, getting a master in English Literature. Oh well, next life.
Chores i continually postpone? Editing.
I’m wading through editing myself, so I do understand! Although once I actually sit down I always enjoy teasing the story into something stronger and more coherent than it was.
Thanks so much for commenting!
That’s the best part of being young: so much expectations what to do when…. thinking (mistakenly) the other grass is greener, but forgetting the amount of manure it takes. Lovely days when all you had to worry about, was if you had brought the correct books when attending school.
Most chores should be delegated to house-elves.
But doing so or house delivery can grow into tunnel vision.
Working better than school? Right now, I’m daydreaming about going back, getting a master in English Literature. Oh well, next life.
Chores i continually postpone? Editing.
I am the laundry-doer in my house, which means I pack up the week’s worth of dirty clothes and head to the laundromat once a week where I spend about 90 minutes fighting off mosquitoes around the laundromat and dealing with people, many of whom do not realize they are part of something called “polite society”. These people feel quite at liberty to hold loud cell phone conversations (sometimes on speaker!), yell at their kids whom they allow to run around the laundromat like crazy, and take up a dozen top-row dryers with five pieces of clothing apiece.
I do not envy you at. All. Laundry AND people? That’s just heaping punishment on punishment. I’ll even take the mosquitoes over that, although they’re way too fond of me.
So many of your listed items are the same as my own. And I can tell you from the perspective of a family of five that there were a few solid years when we had to do two to three loads of laundry every day just to be able to take off on Sunday. And we didn’t even have the extra school clothes to deal with, because we homeschooled! It was just a simple volume of five people living in a house.
Vacuuming and dusting is my other huge dislike. You know what it’s like having cats, so imagine that paired with an old house that seems to create its own dust from generations long gone. There’s no keeping up with it, and apparently nobody really seems to want to, though we’re all bothered by it.
Come to think of it, grocery shopping is also on my list. Gosh, Kim, I could have written this blog post myself. Add yard work to that list. I love the look of people’s nicely tended flower gardens but can’t manage the time or the energy to pull the weeds that give any a little bit of resistance around vegetables we try to grow. If they don’t come out easily, I give up. And apparently I’m not ashamed to admit it, LOL.
We obviously both need to become filthy rich so we can have someone do these things for us. Or, you know, a little bit rich. That would do, too.
And don’t mention the garden. The one in this apartment is luckily very low maintenance, but it does have ivy on the fence that faces the footpath. I’ve been watching it encroaching for the past week or so, and wondering how long I can leave it before people have to turn sideways to reach the door of the building…