Things are Looking Up

Well, it looks like things are coming together nicely at work, and that I'm going to be in a much more stable position as of now than I was. This means I can start to settle down here on PEI a little more. PEI really isn't so bad after all, even in the Winter. Hell, it's not like I did very much in the Summer when I've been here :)

It's still weird to realize that all of my friends are pretty much grown up. We don't talking about anything different, though. And we don't act any differently. I always expected that when I reached a certain age and started working at a real job that I would suddenly transform into something like every other grown up you see hurrying down the street every day. But I still love nothing more than to sit and watch cartoons all day while eating cookies and not having any responsibilities when I can.

But instead something else is happening, I'm starting to see that most people have their little holdovers from when they were young. Ming likes his D&D, Sabrina likes her dragons and her Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the people at work all have theirs as well, wrestling, fantasy novels or horror movies.

I guess that's part of growing up too, is realizing that even if you're older that people don't suddenly change from one mode into another. Most people still keep a good chunk of what makes them who they are, and are just a little more conservative about expressing their interests to strangers. I like Iron Maiden as much as I ever did, but I probably wouldn't be as apt to wear a T-Shirt with Eddie on it while walking around town. (but I also wouldn't wear a dress shirt to a concert, so there's much room there). People just seem to become less expressive as they get older, perhaps.

But I'm definitely noticing that it's not nearly as frowned upon to still like kid's stuff as it was in my parents' generation. When the expected thing to do was to settle down and have kids right away, and fit in with your neighbours and go to church and be 'respectable'. But now, as kids we move out to go to university at 18, and that's about the worst place to learn real responsibility, and not the 'get it all done the night before' kind. And now I'm finding that many of my friends still live 4 to a house, still grabbing furniture from anywhere they can, and continuing to live like students. And I guess the difference is that society just can't support young people in their first jobs starting families now. So people adapt, and don't have kids until later on, and because their parents stopped telling them how to live long ago, and there's no more church influencing everyone's decisions, and pop culture is such a mess, then it's perfectly fine. And considering the massive debt it requires to get all the things people are expected to have a normal consumer life, it's probably for the best.