growing up? growing old? (II)

Other things than next door's potential future ASBO have set me musing about my age and where I am recently... hardly surprising when you stop and think. In three weeks I'll turn 28, I'm unemployed (albeit by choice), single, dogless and almost directionless... of course all that could just be put down to a delayed mid-youth crisis* if I believed in such guff. Instead I'm prompted to look for goals, examine where I am in relation to where I want to be, and think about how I want to go about continuing being a grown-up.

I'm starting to feel like I could do without some of the grown-up trappings I've accumulated. The car springs to mind. Summer is money-haemorrhaging season for my car (MOT, Tax, Insurance) and while I love it to bits, I'm really missing the freedom of not owning one. The house is another area of rethink: I'm still undecided on exactly what should happen next beyond wanting very much to live in the city again... renting seems like a possibility though, and a year ago I'd have dismissed that out of hand having 'moved on' to ownership.

Relationships are another thing altogether: in some ways I've yet to manage being a grown-up there. I have great friends and a wonderful family, in both areas very adult and grown-up relationships on the whole but romantic relationships have never yet worked for me. Maybe having to figure out a non-standard sexuality's slowed me down there? I don't mean in terms of identity: I'm very comfortable with who I am, and have been for a long time. Thinking about it though I missed out on all that 'figuring out' time my straight peers got in school and at college. I didn't date, instyead having (mostly secret and hidden) trysts. That might have been a lot of fun but it's useless as experience for fathoming how to be with someone... and yet to a degree it's set the tone: The other night I was out clubbing with some friends, chatting up a friendly and very attractive Canadian tourist** I was getting on really well with him, but when he went to the bar and I had the obligatory "so, how's it going?" conversation with my friends... and the answer was nowhere which is OK but makes you wonder a bit the day after.

Looking at it this way my mid twenties have been a late adolesence for my romantic development... maybe not but either way I feel ready for something a bit more grown up in that department.

Which brings us to work. I had a steady 9-5 job for four years but I've not yet had anything you could call a career... do we have careers these days? or is that line of reasoning just a cop-out for being directionless? No I'm not directionless, I'm just having some trouble finding a good route for my direction, there's progress there too though.

*The term is just one I heard used on TV a while back, I used it 'cus it seemed kind of funny, but that so many people have bothered to define it is almost worrying. As far as I'm concerned life by nature is full of change, uncertainty and (all too often) a vague sense of disatisfaction, (which seems like what's being described there) I've always just thought that's what drove us to grow and change. Perhaps the difference is that I do a lot of navel gazing am more prone than most to reflection, and so I'm aware of it all the time rather than just at decimally convenient chronological mile stones?

** I have no idea whty, but Canadians keep appearing in my world, more often than not completely independently of each other, do you think the universe is trying to tell me something? Or are