This is hard.

Starting a blog post is hard. It’s hard because I’m so critical that anything I think of to write is just automatically not good enough. And you know what else is hard? Friggin’ life, man. It’s hard because I have this inherent belief that I am not good enough. I really do not know where that belief even comes from! It’s a source of eternal frustration. Right now I feel like I should be doing so much more. Like, why am I working at this call center job when I have my bachelor’s degree in biology?? Shouldn’t I be doing more? Shouldn’t I be working on learning another language, volunteering in the community, working on piano and guitar, cooking real food, reading tons of intellectual novels, writing insightful blog posts, and getting in super awesome shape, all with a real job that uses my degree somehow? My therapist told me I have unrealistic expectations; I think I’m just lazy.

This blog post was brought to you by 312 Urban Wheat Ale. It’s delicious.

“Are you a teenager or a grown-up?”

This was the question posed to me by six year old cousin. First cousin once removed, if you want to get technical. Little did she know this was not the simple question she thought it was, but a rather philosophical one to my mind.

“What do you think?” I asked her.

“A grown up?” she replied, demonstrating a lack of certainty that was pretty much on par with mine. Then she scurried away before I could answer. Kids.

While I certainly don’t feel like a teenager, I definitely don’t quite feel like an adult either. I often wonder if I’ll ever feel like one. Can I really be an adult if my best friends and I still consider a well-timed fart to be comedic gold? The question eternal.

Aha!

I just found myself thinking about how I’d like to have a compilation of all the amusing thoughts and incidents that occur to me throughout the day. I usually text them to my friends but it would be nice to have them all in one place. I wondered if that was conceited, or weird. Then I thought, could this be what a Twitter is possibly good for?? I never understood before this moment.

Introvert Problems

I seem to be reading a lot of books about introverts lately. They make me feel better about being one. Right now I’m flying through The Introvert Advantage. I’m enjoying it very much, despite how dated it seems at times. At one point the author recommends a list of now-mostly forgotten 90’s movies for the introverted soul. For example, Notting Hill, a movie that only sticks out in my mind because I ate so many gummy worms while watching it that I threw them all up later. Or perhaps that simply spoke to the quality of the movie in my 7-year old mind. On further thought, perhaps I’m not qualified to call a 90’s movie forgotten.

Well, anyway! I also recently finished reading Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, which was very enlightening. I could probably spend days holed up in my room reading enlightening books if it weren’t for the overwhelming guilt and judgement I’d feel from others knowing just how much nothing I am wont to do. As much as I was sad about having a new roommate so soon after the old one moved out, it may be better for me to never discover how much of a hermit/slob I’m capable of becoming without the presence of others to temper my more unsavory tendencies. Like wearing the same grungy sweatpants for days on end. One might shudder to think of what a sad, slippery slope it could be if I did live alone! And yet a part of me yearns to never feel imposed on by other humans when I’m not expecting it. To be able to watch trash TV on the couch with a tub of ice cream and grungy sweatpants (or no pants for that matter), without a care in the world. Oh how wonderfully pathetic it could be! Sigh.

At the time I started writing this post, I had agreed to go out to a karaoke bar with my new roommate (along with other people I didn’t know, i.e. the worst kind of people) and I was regretting it. I would have much rather stayed home to be productive, perhaps by reading a few dozen Buzzfeed articles. Maybe it was the social lubricant that is a double rum and coke washed down with two beers, but it actually turned out to be a pretty fun night. Forget about the fact that social situations seem to make me drink like a man who’s about to beat his wife, hurray for unexpected good times!!