I just finished my first can of Gillette Shave Gel today.  I bought it 5 years ago, when I first went to college.  I now shave every day when I used to shave every week or two.  Am I an adult yet?

I actually get up every day and look forward to my first cup of coffee and turning on the morning news.  I am excited to learn what is going on in the city and need to learn if there are any subway problems.  Am I an adult yet?

I recently got a full time, 9-6, job and I am very  enthusastic about going to work every day for a regular amount of time.  Am I an adult yet?

I pay for my own rent, electricity, gas, cable tv, and internet.  I actually write checks every month.  Am I an adult yet?

I still enjoy a good nap now and then.  Nope.

I have just been offered a new full time job at a web design place that makes websites for high schools.  I will be building new sites from scratch for schools that join the network and giving tech support to teachers who call in with issues.  I will be doing something that has absolutely nothing to do with chemistry.

I don’t know how to write about the importance of reading, the gravity of curiosity, and the usefulness of useless knowledge without sounding egotistical, pretentious and vain and I apologize preemptively.  All I can say is that it apparently worked out for me pretty well as most of the jobs that I had previously were solely using skills I learned as a hobby.

Reading is not a talent, nor a skill, and it really should be utilized as the ubiquitous solution to boredom and problem solving that it was meant for when your kindergarten teacher first made you sound out the words to Goodnight Moon (or Goodnight God if such was your early education).   Although personally my fight in terms of education would more likely be the proliferation of new cultural views on science and math, the idea that reading is still a rare concept in college educated folk is crazy to me.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about the reading that involves actually having to open a book and read cover to cover; I mean the reading that satiates curiosity and fills in gaps in the brain.

Whenever you wonder something, read about it.  Useless stuff comes up once in a while.  Useless stuff can get you regular full time jobs with health insurance and 2 weeks vacation.

I need to express what I am doing here. I don’t really want this to be a famous blog or anything. I would just like to remember some things a little more formally than I am used to. I have grand intentions of making this somewhere where I can publish worthwhile prose but I have to conquer my two huge problems in writing. It takes me hours to write something that would take a normal person 20 minutes and I write like I am a 70 year old man who dreams of the days when judges had white wigs or MLK was a person instead of a boulevard.

I’ll figure these things out eventually. (The previous sentence used to be ‘I’ll be addressing these concerns eventually’…see what I’m talking about; I’m George Washington’s pen.) Practice is the only way to make yourself better at something and I can get myself dedicated to things when I want to.

I am now a real life working class citizen, getting up every day to increase the GDP of our wonderful US of A. I have five jobs and hopefully that will soon change to just one or two.

I am reading a lot nowadays. I finished 1984, The Arabian Nights, all the Sherlock Holmes stories, and the Importance of Being Earnest, in about a month. I just started Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield yesterday. This was the first book that my dad ever read in english, when he was about 10 years old. His old English grandfather diction makes so much more sense to me now. The only problem with this discovery is that it annuls the idea that my writing style’s seriousness could have stemmed from the same cause as my father’s speech. I never read these books when I was younger and god only knows what my great christian school taught me. (Although, I must admit that the ‘Literature Department,’ if you can call it that, was run very competently.)

Gone are the days of “I had a muffin today” posts.