My Quarter Life Gherkin
I recently became the proud owner of a tattoo, and in the same week, got a drastic hair cut & dye job. A friend of mine called me on it and demanded to know if I was going through a mid-life crisis.
When I hear the term ‘mid-life crisis’, I think of an elderly gentleman in a small sports car too close to the ground. So I did some Googling research and found something more fitting, which also didn’t involve me having to wear a toupee or marry a cocktail waitress named Tiffani: A Quarter-Life Crisis is a crisis that may be experienced in one’s twenties, involving anxiety over the direction and quality of one’s life.
Even without ink and a set of bangs I think I would probably qualify; having quit a good job, sold all my shit & peaced out to family and friends to travel the world due to the aforementioned life direction anxiety. I thought that calling it a crisis was a bit dramatic though. So I did some more Googling research and apparently ‘pickle’ is a synonym for crisis, which I much prefer. And taking this, 78 steps further, a pickle is a type of gherkin therefore a crisis could also be a gherkin? No? Yes? Who wants a burger RIGHT NOW?
I realise I lead a charmed life and I count myself lucky every 17 minutes of the day. It is a fact that 99.99% of all people in the world are worse off than me. I know this and I don’t feel sorry for myself or anything silly like that. But I do think that if I have the luxury to do what makes me happy; shouldn’t I spend some time seeking that out and make sure I am doing the right thing with the short amount of time that I have? So glad you agree.
Oh, if only there was a Sorting Hat for What To Do With One’s Life, similar to the sorting hat used at The Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry for sorting the students into the different magical houses. I could put the SHfWTDWOL on my head and instead of it telling me which magical house I should be in (I would be in Gryffindor obviously), it would look into my soul/heart/spleen and tell me without doubt what I should be doing with my life. And if that hat so proclaimed that my destiny was be an Ice-Cream Flavour Developer at Ben & Jerry’s then so help me, I would spend the rest of my days being the best damn Ice-Cream Flavour Developer the world has ever known. I would also probably become extremely easy to see. Even from far, far away places. Like Italy. Or Space.
And yes I know I made noises about maybe possibly wanting to be a writer but I think that this would be a classic case of running before walking (or swallowing before chewing), since I have only been managing to average a blog post every lunar eclipse or so. In the real world this type of diligence would not be monetarily well rewarded. I would be really poor and I wouldn’t be able to afford necessities like running water and handbags.
So I am giving this whole Life Plan thing a bit more thought.
Please bear with me.
