Peter (s)Pan(k)

I live a grown-up modern adult life. I cook, I pay rent, I clean my shower, I even buy electricity (which is much less exciting than the “Energon Cubes” of Transformers led me to expect). I am the very model of a constructive pillar of society.

But I don’t feel that way. Most of the time I feel like a bundle of guinea pigs standing on top of each other wearing a trench coat. I was at a party recently and there were other people there, grown-up people having grown-up conversations about work. The kind of conversation where there are smiles and laughter but the words were all about things that aren’t funny or happy; words like “skillset” and “aquisitional”. I sort of stood dumbly on the sidelines offering occasional comments, but basically feeling like a child invited to sit at the grown-ups table.

The thing is, it’s not that I didn’t understand the conversation. Through my own experiences in the world of work I recognised a lot fo what was being discussed and probably could have contributed more. Except I didn’t want to.

I think on some level it’s just that I don’t want to spend my free time, especially my sociable free time, talking about things that alternately bore and depress me. Why talk about internal auditing when there are some really interesting oil paintings over there? Why empathise with someone’s chain of reporting responsibilities when you could be talking about their most recent elements of self-discovery. Why talk about work when you can talk about literally anything else?

But there’s still a part of me that whispers that the reason I don’t want to talk about those things is that I’m not really a grown-up. That if I was really an adult I’d care more about getting a mortgage and a car and the difference between Rugby League and Rugby Union.

So right now I could sit here and finish off my tax return, or go to a munch and talk about awesome kinky things, with cake, and coffee, and people who won’t look at me like a serial killer when I start talking about rope.

Which do you think I’m going to do?