When Did I Get So Old?!?

Taking a detour from our normal livestock discussions, I wanted to sit on the shrink couch and share something I just discovered about myself. I’ve become an old person. Not elderly, but definitely an adult now. How I came about this realization and its implications I will explain in this post.

After I finish my Jell-O.

So yesterday as I was out in the yard getting it ready for the snow that will probably blanket South Dakota for the next four months (horay…) I broke a commandment and coveted one of my neighbor’s goods. I was raking leaves with a $5 plastic rake, because that’s all I can afford while I wallow in the LeBrea Tar Pits of student debt. I noticed this lovely leaf sweeper that my neighbor had sitting in his yard. All he had to do was hook it up to a lawn tractor (which my tar-stained pocketbook can’t swing) and drive across his yard to take all those pesky leaves away. I stared at it longingly as I awkwardly pulled leaves into a trash can with my dollar store rake, wishing for a toy as fine as that.

What a beautiful sight to behold. Lucky bastard.

At that moment I realized, “When did my life get so lame and adulty that I really wanted someone’s stupid leaf sweeper?” I mean, it wasn’t a decade ago when I tried to stay awake while my parents talked with their friends about incredible boring stuff like this. Back then, when they were comparing the merits of tile flooring versus vinyl, I was thinking about the incredible lame-sauce that they must have for breakfast every day to care about things like this. But now, here I am, doing the same thing.

That is the lame-sauce drizzled over my Jell-O. Don’t touch that Jell-O unless you want me to bore you with lectures about how life was so much harder when I was your age.

Really, it’s too late for me to go back now–I’m pretty much an adult. I have a career, a wife, a mortgage, and all my facebook friends have pictures of babies on their Timelines instead of football tailgates. I even consider 11 pm to be a super-late bedtime. When did this happen? When did I go from XBox to lawn equipment? From college parties to office parties? From all-you-can-eat buffets to…well, okay, that hasn’t changed. But you get my point.

But, looking at it, this adult stuff actually beats the heck out of being a kid. Now I make money instead of borrowing it for school. I’m not sitting in class all day anymore, and I certainly don’t need a hall pass just to go to pee. Going to bed early is pretty darn nice–being rested and such makes a person more amiable. Best yet–I’ve got my Carolyn, my cows, and I can use vacation time to go deer hunting. Yep, goodbye childhood, hello adulthood! Now I’ll go back to raking leaves.

-Jake

 

photo credit: <a href=”https://www.flickr.com/photos/bacr33/2417752216/”>sixpackshack</a&gt; via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a&gt; <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>cc</a&gt;