Careering Out Of Control

I was twenty-one years when I wrote this song
I'm twenty-two now but I won't be for long
Time hurries on
And the leaves that are green turn to brown

Those Simon and Garfunkel lyrics apply literally to me (apart from the fact that obviously I didn't write that song). I'll be twenty-three later this month, and I'm a little embarrassed to say that I still live with my parents. The thing is, despite being (presumably) pretty employable with my physics degree, I'm not entirely sure what I want to do with my life and didn't want to throw myself into a career straight after university. Also, I never had a gap year after sixth form, so I feel I owe myself one last year of being carefree and irresponsible.

My plan for the year is to earn as much money as I can be arsed to and use it to do fun things. Simple, really. I've got a growing list of these fun things to do, varying wildly in price. Here's a selection:

• A week camping in Devon or Cornwall, surfing and writing songs (cheap)
• A month or so in USA/Canada, just generally having fun (expensive)
• A week camping in North Wales, hiking and writing songs (cheap)
• A summer tour with my band (expensive when you factor in the van I'm planning on buying - more info in a future post I'm sure)
• Various trips to see mates who have ended up dotted around the country (cheap)
  
• A mystery trip, possibly to New Zealand or somewhere very exciting like that but I'm leaving this one open (expensive)

Anyway, I was talking about my lack of career. As a kid (that sounds very American, but then I thought 'child' sounded wrong for some reason), there were many things I wanted to be: train driver, WWF wrestler, footballer, rock star, etcetera. As a teenager and then (I suppose) an adult, I started to accept more realistic ideas of what to do with myself, but I'm happy to say that I never gave up on music. For a few years I was thinking about a physics PhD, but I went off the idea (and my less-than-wonderful 2:2 grade would make it difficult to find one anyway). My current plan is teaching - I've always had the idea in the back of my mind, and still haven't come up with a good argument against it. It has a lot of things going for it, not least that sleeping at night would be a lot easier in a job that wasn't for a big, nasty corporation. The main thing, though, is that the long holidays would mean I'd never have to give up on the rock star dream. Like, literally, never. I mean, it'll probably get less likely that I'll make the cover of NME once I hit 40, but there's always folk music.

The problem with this entry is that I've written it whilst listening to music. Specifically, I've been listening to the acoustic duo Show Of Hands' album 'Witness', which has folky, story-based lyrics that actually make sense rather than being wrapped up in bad metaphors, as a lot of modern lyrics seem to be. Mine included. Anyway, the problem with this is that I end up listening to the lyrics and losing my thread whilst typing. This is my excuse for the rambling nature of this and, sod it, all other posts.

One final comment that might be of interest to people: I tried finish a sentence in this post with 'etc', but was told by Firefox's spell-checker (yes, I'm on about this again) that the correct spelling would be 'etc.' (note the full stop). However, since I was finishing a sentence, a full stop was already in place. I attempted to add a second full stop in case this was the accepted behaviour in such situations, but Firefox held firm in its belief that I was missing a full stop. No matter how many I added, it wasn't happy. Investigating further, I typed 'etc' (without a full stop) in the middle of a sentence and was correctly told that this required a full stop to denote the abbreviation. This is where I discovered that I was not to blame - having right-clicked on the offending word and selected 'etc.' as a suitable alternative, a full stop appeared but the red line under 'etc' remained. It seems Firefox is happy to include full stops in its list of correct words, but will not take note of them once they have been added to the sentence. I'm glad I haven't tried to turn on an auto-correct function, or this post might have ended with 'etc......................................' (etc.).