18 years and 48 hours old

I'm 18 now, and have been so for about 48 hours. Therefore I am now legally able to smoke if I wanted to or access certain (ahem!) websites, again, if I wanted to. I don't want to do either anyway, not at the present moment at least. I am 18, working, and hating it. I was planning to resign, actually, before my birthday on the past Sunday; it's one of my busiest days of the week as I go to church in the morning, rush to piano lessons after that, wolf down a bit of lunch, and try to arrive at the mart by 12.30 for work. Needless to say I usually fail to make it on time. As I said, I was planning to resign, and nearly did so until my mom got wind of my plans, upon which she told me not to with the best of reasons: 'You stop work and you get out of the house!' Well, I don't particularly want to be homeless at this time (I haven't finished the books yet) so I stuck with the job. I'm now, as aforementioned, hating it and making very sure everybody around me knows it. Except my chat partners online; it's enough yelling at people live without doing it online too. About me not finishing the books: yes, I speed read. But then Shakespeare is really, really, deep, so it takes some time to really understand the dialogue. And really funny! The exchanges between some of his characters are so incredibly witty that I found myself laughing at the book. (My grandma thought I was going nuts.) I mean, only Shakespeare (of all my read authors so far) has characters who torture their loved ones--on purpose!--and use that as PROOF that they love them...or love triangles so convoluted that even the characters in the drama don't understand who's loving whom who is loving whom...or even love/hate relationships so weird that the drama sounds like a psycho thriller. Oh yeah, and he's also really (with all due respect) salty (yellow or blue minded). The first act of Romeo and Juliet is so peppered with reproductive references that it might even be the Victorian version of a romance novel. I have become one of the few victims of mistaken identity who have profited by it. Today, one of my customers grabbed me by the sleeve after I loaded her trolley. My first thought was that she wanted to whack me over the head for some weird mistake or other; instead, she asked me if I knew her son Nathan or Newton or some such person. I said 'Uh...' and she took that as an affirmative reply, whereupon she thrust an angpow at me and vanished. It contained ten bucks, and I spent the rest of the day wondering who Nathan was and how his mother 'recognised' me. You know, I now see birthdays as a kind of double-edged blade: you get the gifts and the nice treatment for a day or two, but then along come the responsibilities and the additional duties (be more mature, more caring, more helpful etc). [Later] I just got back from Survey, where I got my first birthday present yet: a pair of jeans, bought on 50% discount. Well, I'm a stingy person even when my mom's footing the bill. And anyway, jeans are jeans no matter what they look like; I only checked for fit and colour (as dark a blue as possible). And yes, my mom came along. I needed a ride and I wanted to avoid all are-you-wearing-that-thing-out-of-the-house arguments. I've had enough of those.