I've gotta wake up bright and early tomorrow - no, today - to be at Bartending School by 10:00. Have checked and double-checked the train schedule, and I ought to be in the city by 9:00, which should give me plenty of time to wander about in the early morning. Hopefully, The Book Trader on South Street - the greatest book store that ever was and ever will be (I got every bit of my Marxist literature from there when I was going through my Marxist phase, and they've got just about everything else) - will be open around then. Otherwise, eh, I'll just wander around South Street. I've been there in the evenings all too often, and sometimes in the early afternoon, but I've never been there at 9:00 in the morning, and I'm intrigued as to what the environs will be like then.
The folks are coming back late tomorrow, so I spent two hours or so tonight cleaning everything up. Not that it was that dirty to begin with, but I made it much cleaner than it was before they left, since I know they're going to find something to yell at me for and I'll need all the brownie points I can get.
Having the house to myself this vacation was not quite what I wanted. It would have been great to have the house to myself as something to come home to, but being stuck in it - since the folks brought the car with them and left it at the airport - by myself was far from ideal.
Ericson - who I'm still royally pissed at, but, eh, sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and move forward - insists that my number one priority right now should not be academics or a job or whatever, but should instead be figuring out how to bypass my parents and be fully independent of them as soon as possible.
Even without him pointing that out, I'm realizing that more and more these days. Living at home and by my parents whims has been downright demoralizing, and they have done little but get in the way of everything I want to do. Agreeing to send me off to Bartending school (which costs a little more than half of what they would have spent on me had they brought me to London with the rest of the family on vacation) has been about the only "bone" they've thrown me lately, if it can, in fact, even be called that.
To take Erik's whole theory on "teen angst" a step further, I think that one of the primary driving forces behind said angst is the teen's relationship to the parents and their home life.
For me, of course, this has changed very little, and I'm trying extremely hard to keep said angst under wraps. I see now that my success up to this point has been marginal, at best, and this is extremely aggrevating.
The first step towards total independence from the parentals at this point seems to be financial independence, which, hopefully, this bartending gig will help in. My primary fear right now is that this will become another beginning that never begins, and that I'll go off to bartending school only to find that there are no obtainable positions as a bartender, but I will fight this, I will. It will certainly help that this time around my parents will have no say in the outcome.
Ugh, but one thing at a time, one thing at a time. It's already past 2:00, and in a little more than four hours I'll have to wake up. Let me see if I can do that, first; then I'll worry about this silly freedom...