You know you’re getting old when…

1. You start wearing cardigans.
2. You own more than one cardigan.
   
3. Corned beef sandwiches with tomatoes become food of the gods.
4. You consider having a thermos of tea with you most of the time a good idea.
5. You carry your own brand of special tea with you just in case you have forgotten your thermos and decide that you’d like a cup of hot water. That you’re still willing to pay for…
   
6. ‘Young people’ suddenly include everyone who is about a year younger than you.
7. The said ‘young people’ irritate you beyond belief.
8. You start saying ‘when I was your age…’
9. The children of your family think your music is ‘unusual’.
10. Staying in over the weekend to watch as much of your favourite television series as you can (with a cup of tea) is your idea of a perfect holiday.
    
11. You get excited by the prospect of having to stay up late to finish some work.
12. You read before you go to bed. And you wear glasses as you do.
13. Checking the unit price of everything you buy is the shopping experience.
14. Forgetting where you put your bra no longer concerns you; a jumper will do the trick until it shows up…
15. The postal service becomes a never-ending source of malcontent.
16. You start panicking when you find out a close family member is ‘growing up’ because you can remember changing their nappies and you don’t want the world to hurt them.
17. You hate the doctors.
18. You’d rather see through that raging chest infection than see the doctor.
19. You’d sooner be carted off in an ambulance than see the doctor.
20. You’re bitter. About everything.
    

Bad habits

I’m far too young to be looking back at significant points in my life and deciding that they were a waste of time. I’m also too apathetic to care about whether or not casting off the relatively green wisdom of those moment will have complex implications at a later date.

Having spent the majority of life in my own head, happily oblivious to the outside world, you would have thought that I know what I’m doing with myself, but for whatever reason, I’m probably the most gormless individual on the planet. Which suits me. This frail ego suits me.

Taking the advice of others is bad news for the egocentric. If you’re going to be something, then be it. I’m not taking advice and hammering it into my being any longer. It results in me drawing elaborate time tables that have me awake at 8am reading things that should only be read over a bottle of Chilean Shiraz. It results in me turning my life into a series of multi-coloured boxes that map out how I should be spending my time, time that I know I can’t be bothered to waste on preparation and reading that I haven’t got the patience for. Taking another person’s advice to heart results in me being miserable.

There’s something to be said about being a chaotic, time-wasting, apathetic individual. When you need to get things done, you get them done in your own time using your own methods. It’s stressful, painful and irritating at points but then spending weeks on end before a deadline worrying continuously about how to spend my ample amounts of time is just as pointless as knowing and trying to do something about my habit of working by my own lax schedule. Just so that I can fit in? Follow the rules? Do what is expected of me? Really…

I’m not the writer who will sit and note down every detail of every surrounding that I encounter every day of my life. I’m internalized, blind, reclusive and pretty much socially incompetent. I’m not afraid to flip off the status quo. Quite frankly, I don’t care.

I don’t care that there’s a time break in that story or that you think a particular image doesn’t work; it works for me and the gap in time is supposed to be there so that I don’t have to spend six pages describing what happened between time A and time B. I do care however, about how I deliver the story.

The differences between opinion and advice are slight; the trick is knowing how to be selfish enough to pick out the stuff that gives you a damn good reason to alter something that isn’t working from the general nit-picked rubbish that tells you either

a) what you already know,
b) that your reader hasn’t bothered to read at all or
c) that you’re never going to please everyone.

Bottom line – you may as well go ahead and please yourself.

I intend to embrace my bad habits and no longer be ashamed of the fact that I’m a very internal person, only ever ‘noticing’ things around me when they are sucked in by the eternal vacuum of deaf experience, processed through a series of daydreams and nightmares, and then spat out when I sit down and say to myself ‘Something is bugging us. What?’

I was told a few years back that my attitude would never do me any favours, that I had to discipline myself in order to progress in life. I’ve been stagnating in that pool of advice for nearly five years.

You want to tell me that’s healthy?