Peter's Problems

So, First of all, I’ll promptly apologise for the blog’s tardiness, but the reason it was late actually leads quite well onto my topic this week. I fell asleep.

Now as much as I’d love to talk about sleeping today it’s not actually the topic of this edition of the Crack’d Pot, this week’s talking point, as you may have deduced from the clever title, is growing up, and more importantly the restrictions of this inevitable happening, but not the usual stuff.

OK so, if I’m not talking about the generic parts of getting old; smelliness, crippleness and incoherence, what am I talking about? And also, you’re not old Joe, you are barely a man, what right do you have to lecture us on growing up?
None, it’s the internet, I don’t need them.
And to the previous question; I’m talking about the point of life which I am at now, the most terrifying time in young people and parents alike; Adolescence. There are huge differences in being a “kid”, as I shall be referring to them as from now on, and being a “Teenager”, as I shall be referring to us as from now on despite the negative stigma attached to the word, and not just the usual: Hair in new places; sudden growth; “interest” in new people but a new abundance of things that you’ve got to do to keep cool (or “keep up appearances”, as a quick nod to an old sitcom).

Here’s the thing, growing up seems to have gotten a lot harder recently, when I was a kid I had a relatively easy life; an embarrassing family and many, many questions, and now I’m a teenager I’ve got it relatively easy once again, just the usual exams and panic and stress from relationships of all kinds. But to me, the thing that was easiest about growing up, about this transition between being a kid and being a big goat, I mean teenager, was that I was allowed to do my own thing, not just by my parents, but by my friends and the government.
“Blaming the government?” I hear you say, “Hark, jumping on the blame bandwagon are we? Playing the BlameGame (tm) the same way as everyone else are we? Using all the Clichés are we?

Technically yes. You see not too long ago I was looking for a gun, not a real one mind you, a fake one. So we found one, 3 to be precise. Now 2 of these were spud guns (if you don’t remember these, you may as well stop reading now, you’re far too young for this material) and the 3rd was a cap gun, you must remember cap guns, how else did you play Cowboys and Indians (Native Americans)? So I was talking and laughing to my friend about how hard it was to find these things when I got to the till and turned to see this guy, must have been about 20 years old, not much older than me, you know the kind; spotty, looks like a Iced finger donut, looking at me. I put the guns onto the counter and he says to me;
“Have you got any ID?”
“Err no, why?”
“You have to be 18 to buy a gun.”
“But its not real?”
“Nope even toy ones, it’s THE LAW”

Now stop me when I get preachy, but when I was a kid we could go into a shop and buy a BB gun, and as my friend James will tell you, these things could draw blood, they could blind people! You could actually hijack a plane with one of these! You could go in there, buy a couple of them and you could be 12! I mean, now you can’t even go into a toy shop (we’ll get to that in a minute) and buy something that fires potato, that’s right, A VEGETABLE. And I mean, if you have actual AGE RESTRICTED products in a TOY STORE, things that you have to be 18 to buy, where does it end? Bouncers in front of green grocers in case someone causes hassle with a kiwi?

But another thing I find interesting about growing up is sleep, the seed in which created this tardiness in blogging, is sleep, more importantly sleeping patterns. Anyone who knows me will tell you I love sleep, much much more than the next guy, I have not yet found anything I will put before sleep; an essay to hand in tomorrow and it’s 11PM? My brain wont work, but my dreams will. Entire scrubs marathon on E4 for 24 hours straight? Seen them before, I’ll catch it on +1. Apocalypse? It can wait. I constantly berate people for having erratic or insufficient sleep patterns, and this isn’t because it’s cool to have loads of sleep at my age, it’s generally because I really love bed. I mean I had a 2 hour nap when I got home from college on Tuesday, which is the best feeling in the world.

But it got me thinking, when I was a kid, I would stay up to what seemed like midnight (when in fact it would be like 10) and then at school in the sandpit we’d attempt to outdo each other by adding on half hours to the previous person’s time. Then you realise, in secondary school that “bedtime” doesn’t matter as long as it’s not before 9. Then you get to my age where it is natural to not go to sleep until about 11 or 12 (for me, 1 sometimes) and you don’t make anything out of it. So the general trend seems to be that the older you get the longer you stay up. Not so, my dad and mum are normally in bed by 10, almost definitely by 11. But it’s fine you say, they’re old, it happens earlier than you think, my sister, in her early 20’s is normally in bed by that time, if not sooner, and she is never out the night before.
So growing up is different now to what it was for us, while we would lie about what time we would go to bed (One kid said to me “I was up till half past eleventy” and we were in awe) I’m sure that kids today just don’t sleep, staying up for no reason apart from “older kids do it so it must be cool” No! It’s just hardwired into us, we can’t help it! And while they don’t have fun things like BB guns or potato rifles, they have shed loads of energy drinks and caffeinated food to keep them up. It is indeed a future of nocturnal humans. (or Batmen)

Joe Strange
Once killed a man for keeping him up.