Jim - waiting till after Uni was my original plan but I wanna get myself ready for that time, is all. If I haven't grown up in two years then I will not be prepared for the real world and will fall on my knees. I'm trying to think ahead.
Well, maybe therein lies your problem. That 'get out there and face the world' after university is over mentality. I can't see myself knowing what I want out of life for a long time. I guess that it's different if you do. I just finished my third year at college, not because I really wanted to or because I failed my courses, but because halfway through my first year I realized that I didn't want to be studying maths or computing. I have no aspiration to be an adult because I'm not even sure what that is anymore. Maybe watching Big Brother has enforced that feeling even more. There are people that I meet, people that I have met, who are ten years older than me or more, but were I to interact with them on a non-tangible level, though I see no reason why I would want to, I would have no idea of it! Yet while there are those who who seem to embody what I would consider a Man to be, to declare outright that there are only some who can reach manhood is to falsify all notion of it and sever it from being a stage of progression in life!
... Which of course is ridiculous. You cannot say that only some will achieve it is expected that all, who survive that long, will become.
I did used to think that there was a clear distinction, that there was a cut off (that was difficult not to go into some Curb......). But now I'm not so sure.
Maybe being a Man is nine til five; maybe being a man is paying bills; maybe it's settling down, having a wife and getting some children out there. I don't know. But the whole thing is so ambiguous, contradcitory and vague that, if I am completely honest, I can't see it ever being an ambition of mine. I guess it's like being smart. Some people are, and some people aren't. And then there are those people that kind of are. People that never will be, and people that once were not.
The closest that I can reach, in my own mind at least, at this stage in life, is that my own personal definition of what it takes to be a Man is something that not everybody will achieve. Which, as I said, is just ridiculous.
As a side note, I didn't write those paragraphs are in the order that they are in. I don't know how coheerant, or even relevant, this is. Proof read? Bollocks! I've got to go to work in a minute......