Even though I was finished with college, the School of Hard Knocks was just beginning. Sometimes, it felt like other people got an all-expenses paid scholarship to attend while I had to toil and sweat to earn my way. Here's a bunch of things that would have been nice to expect.
1. Real life is like a summer vacation that never ends.
It was such a relief to wake up every day and worry about only having to show up at one location at the same time. This was one of the areas in which college was proabably worse than high school. In high school, just about everything was confined to one small area of town. In college, it wasn't uncommon to have one class on one side of the campus and the next one on the other side. I didn't have to jot down notes to keep track of where I needed to be every minute of the day.
2. You don't need to close the bathroom door and lock it when you're relieving yourself or taking a shower.
This took me a month to figure out. All of my life, I had shared facilities with other people. I definitely felt weird the first time I peed with the door open. I was so afraid that someone was going to suddenly walk through the front door in stealth mode and come straight to the bathroom. This is probably the one thing I miss most about living single.
3. Intelligence is no longer a requirement for the women you want to date.
I had high standards for women to be able to keep up with me mentally in high school and college. Once I got out in the real world, that didn't matter so much any more. At this point, I was just looking for someone I was mildly attracted to who didn't have a problem with my rather obvious quirks.
4. Your cooking is really going to suck for the first few months.
I can't tell you how many times I overcooked food, undercooked food and set things on fire on the stove. And the thing was, I had to eat it or it would all go down as a massive waste of money. This isn't to say I didn't know how to make food for myself, but I'd certainly never gotten to fry raw meat. This leads us to:
5. There is no store-brand substitute for Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.
Even though my parents were poor during the first part of my childhood, they didn't just buy generic food. They went with the brand names. Even our powdered milk was a brand name, which was Carnation. (Although I did think Shasta was a brand name.) On my own, I didn't always have the luxury of paying for brand-name items, but I soon found out that Kraft Mac and Cheese was one of those things I could not cheap out on.
6. If you buy a pound of hamburger meat, make sure you cook it all right away.
When I was growing up, a pound of hamburger meat was enough for one meal for the entire family. Anytime we took a package out of the freezer, it would all get eaten during the same meal. I made the mistake of frying up a couple of hamburgers from the pound that I purchased, put it back into the refrigerator and tried to cook the rest the next week. When it stank up the whole kitchen, I knew there was no way I could eat it and live. It was wasted food and money, but a lesson well-learned.
7. As expensive as it may seem, you absolutely need a phone.
I didn't have a phone for the first six months I lived on my own. This was back in the landline days. Now, I can't even imagine not having a phone, let alone one that you carry with you everywhere. The only bad thing was that it cost a lot more money than I anticipated, as I was frequently making long distance calls.
8. Friends are going to be so hard to find.
Because of my Asperger Syndrome, it was hard to me to make friends outside of work. It was easier to make friends in school because everybody just kind of gets thrown together. When you find that you don't have anything in common with anybody else in the real world, you can't make those connections like you used to do. This would also hinder me in my ability to get girlfriends.
9. Your parents and other relatives may drop in unannounced from time to time.
I lived three hours away from my parents. They didn't always tell me when they would be up in my area, so they would stop by the house. It would always be in a mess, and since I didn't have a phone for the first six months, I never knew when they (or anyone else) was going to drop in. Of course, I had to remember back when I was a kid, we would drop in on family members unannounced all the time, too.
10. No matter how bad things get, it's still better than living with your parents.
I am so thankful that I got my life in order before graduating from college with a job and an apartment. As it turned out, an increase in the number of college graduates moving back home was starting to take place around the time that I finished school. It would just keep going up after that. I don't necessarily think that my parents gave me proper tools to survive on my own, but they certain made my home life so miserable while I was growing up that I would have done just about anything to keep from living with them again. My brother Loyd, on the other hand, had to move back in with them several times over the next couple of decades. I know they wanted him to be as independent as me at that age, but it just didn't happen.
But I guess everybody has it rough when they're on their own for the first time. I just felt like I was at more of a disadvantage.
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