i'm an adult.

at least by some measure of the term. i remember a year or so ago somebody did some research and determined that adulthood starts at age 26, and if that's the case, at this point, age 24, i find myself still a couple years short. i'm not sure how the folks doing the research arrived at 26, i mean being an adult is like anything else, at least in as much as it means about as many different things as there are people who try and interpret the term. in any case, i don't s'pose that i have much use for the term "adult" or "grown-up" or any other sort of life-stage descriptor, i figure i'll leave stuff like that to the developmental psychologists.

so when you're a lil kid, it's all you can wait for to be a grown-up. you're sort of caught up in the idea that no one can tell you what to do, because to the best of your observation, nobody can tell any of the grown-ups you know what to do. i mean your folks get to go to bed whenever they want, or at least they get to stay up later than you, they decide whenever you get to order pizza and go out for ice cream, and you start to thinking, "when i'm a grown-up, i'm gonna go to bed whenever i want and order pizza whenever i want, and go out for ice cream whenever i want," which, true enough, are all decisions you can make for yourself, in contrast to when you're a lil kid; but then as you get older you realize that the whole situation's not quite as happily simplistic as you figured it'd be when you were a lil kid.

well, i'm not really gonna talk about all that, mostly what i'm gonna talk about right here this second is paying bills, which i guess is somewhat related, because when you're little, in your idealized and romanticized view of adulthood, you never really think about that. so i have this membership at bally's, i've been working out there since february and the deal i got gave me like eight free sessions with a personal trainer. af first, i didn't really anticipate keeping the trainer beyond those eight sessons , but it was uncanny just how perfect of match the trainer that i got paired up with was for me, so i decide to go ahead and pay for a personal training plan, set the whole thing up on my debit card, you know, to where bally's just deducts whatever i owe and i don't gotta write a check every month.

maybe you read about squeaky getting stolen , and if you did, you probly remember me complaining about how much money i had to spend in getting him back in my possession as well as replacing stuff that was stolen from him. that whole deal was already on my mind when my trainer told me that the automatic payments for my workouts weren't going through. i guess, in the interest of disclosure i should say that i'm not really hypervigilant when it comes to the whole finances thing, at least not where detail's concerned, usually i'm ok with a general idea of what's at my disposal in the way of funds. i didn't really figure that i didn't have the money for that payment, but given all the extra expenses from the past few weeks, i was a lil concerned, and really feeling like an inadequate adult, like if i was 26 and really an adult it wouldn't have happened.

i check my account, and sure enough, there's plenty of money in it to make that payment, so i'm puzzled. my debit card expires at the end of next month and i'd gotten a letter from the company they tell me that i needed to update it as soon as i could, that way i wouldn't miss any payments, so i start to thinking it's a problem with my card, but i don't have any problems using it anywhere else, so i'm simply left really, really confused. that night i got a call from bally's, the accounts office or something, telling me the same thing, and so i set it up to pay out of my checking account instead of off my debit card, and the lady i talked to told me i was all set, i mean i knew my checking account number wasn't gonna change, so i figure that it to be all taken care of. all that happened a week ago yesterday. so you can imagine my confusion when yesterday i had a workout scheduled with my trainer, at eight, and about twenty minutes before it's s'posed to start, he calls me saying that the payment still hadn't gone through, so he decides to call the accounts department, and it turns out they were having issues with a new software system they just started using.

all worried i wasn't a real grown-up and it was all someone else's fault, story of my life.

feeling: smart-ass
thinking of: revenge
music: "eastbound traffic" remember maine