I’m at that funny sort of age now when I am finally starting to recognise that I’m not a kid any more. I’ve battled honourably to resist it,   but the the bonds of time are finally starting to take their toll and I know that soon will go to join the world of mortgages, illogical weight-gain and being concerned about gas rates.

There are certain things that it seems only adults say or do and more and more  frequently I find it is me who is saying them and doing them.

For example:

The other day I told a colleague I just needed to step out and move my car. I instantly felt disgusted with myself. Moving ones car might seem like a perfectly harmless thing to do, but lets analysis what it means a bit more…

Firstly the fact that I have a ‘colleague’ is sort of scary. Young people have ‘co-workers’ or ‘that guy I work with’. Adults use ‘colleague’. It implies that they have in a place long enough to understand that using a politically correct term is the only way they will continue to advance their career. Its a way of safely describing someone who you spend most of your time with but may not essentially like, and when you know you could well have much more time with them left to come… but this is all stuff for another day.

Back to the car. Firstly, the sentence ‘I’m just going to move my car’ shows that you are in fact old enough to drive a car (the horror). That means you are probably not still playing with your toy soldiers (unless you a general) or watching Saturday morning cartoons (which you would not do anyway because Saturday morning cartoons suck these days). But that’s okay right? You could still be young enough to be to be wild and free right? Nope.

I should clarify that I needed to move my car because I was in a 30 minute zone, and had been there for 40. Now I don’t want to make a crude generalisation but on the whole young people are reckless and crazy. They are happy to wildly park for 40 minutes in a 30 minutes zone, because they are reckless and crazy enough to take that risk. Its a Saturday, so the parking man probably is not even on. Young people still have that sense of optimism that allows them to drink vodka and dish soap with out fear of consequence.

But when you are an adult, you know that world is dark and depressing. You know that with your luck the parking man is working today, and probably just as annoyed about working on a Saturday as you are. He will slap you with a parking fine simply because he hates you, your car and everything you stand for. He also hates your dog.

So when I say ‘I’m just going to move my car’ its not a simple matter of avoiding a fine, its a sign that all light and hope in your has been crushed. Thats when you really start feeling like a grown up.

An old person apparently.