Cerebral Soup - The Archives
Snot & scabs
The above pic was taken a few hours after I was born 35 years ago. And obviously had been cleaned up a bit.
Mum always remembered fondly my easy birth - pretty much just some cramps and I popped out - but as you can see I was a pretty small baby.
Damn remember when you were at school and you thought your teachers were like ancient because they were in their thirties? Odd to think I'm here now.
And yet I still don't feel like a grown up.
I was watching the news with JMum on Sunday night after waaaay too much food at the Annual Kids Birthday Dinner (seeing as the Boy, Younger Brother and I have Birthdays so close we just have to survive one thankfully), and they had this story about kids and cram schools and the huge amount of pressure that some of these parents put on their kids. So one of the kids is an 11 year old girl and they showed her slaving away over hot books until 2am in the morning (which I think was outrageous but that is for another blog rant). They showed her parents who were both 37. This was at the point when JMum and I got sidetracked.
Two years isn't really much - but damn these people were middle-aged! They had the kid, the house in far surburbia, both Dad and Mum ran their own companies - it seems weird because it is so totally alien to my own experience. Well except for the own company bit - but the rest yeah.
Sometimes I think I may be a late developer in certain ways. On the other hand I think I'm glad to be so. Sure it may be nice to have the kids, house etc done by the time you are in your mid-30s, but then I wouldn't have had all the experiences I have had - being caught out with an auto-flushing toilet on top of the Empire State Building in New York, being driven home in Tokyo by a masturbating hermaphrodite taxi driver, being investigated by security for 2 hours in the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris (for reasons still a mystery), my first and last taste of durian in Singapore and of course being the only straight girl in history to score with a guy in the famous gay district of Shinjuku Ni-chome (just to name a few).
Maybe the whole thing about age is that it's a state of mind. I do adult things like work and pay bills and so on - but most of the time it just feels like I'm playing at grown up.
Someone commented that in the pic I look like I have my dukes up ready to fight. Although really I think the next pic (taken 2 years later) sums me up better.
And although I've learnt since then not to pick my nose, I still haven't learnt not to be a cheeky ratbag. Possibly this is why I won't ever be a real grown up. Because really nothing feels better than running around naked doing what you want to do does it?
Posted by mjd-s on August 15, 2006 3:29 PM