L is for Long Term Goals

Why is my post a day late? Because I have just had the crappest two days stuck in a tiny room with the most obnoxious, vile reason not to have kids that you could imagine, without even an internet connection to distract me from her horridness.


I had forgotten we had planned to head down to KJ's family beach house with some friends until KJ told me on Friday night that they couldn't get their 5 year old daughter looked after, so they were bringing her with them. I thought about cancelling (and in hindsight should have) right then and there.

This kid...honestly, I can hardly explain. I've always been a bit on the cusp about the whole issue of having kids, and one of the reasons is because the idea of breeding some obnoxious little shit like her scares the crap out of me. This kid is the quintessential reason for not having kids. I won't bore you with the whole story, I'll just give you the highlights of what made my weekend so wonderful.


I've been averaging about 3 or 4 hours of very light sleep per night for the last week and as a result, I have a permanent headache at the moment. Insomnia sucks - but it sucks more when on day 8 of your insomnia, some snotty little kid with a lisp is screaming right in your face and when you ask her to knock it off and she keeps going, her parents chuckle as though she's being endearing. I have a pretty low tolerance for drugs so it's a wonder I'm not in a freakin' coma from the amount of codeine I had to take to stop my head throbbing.

Then at 6 am the next morning, when I finally managed to slip into a light sleep, I was immediately woken by her screeching at the top of her voice as she had a tickle fight with her dad. Fun times.

She's a weird kid - she's a bit over 5 years old, but she's big for her age, built like a very sturdy 8 year old. And I guess her behaviour is as much about her parents as it is about her.They didn't discipline her even once, even when she refused to go to bed at 9pm and sat down to watch a pretty graphically violent movie with us.
The little shit talked back, demanded that everyone give her things, ignored everything her parents asked her to do and went through the entire house top to the bottom opening every door and cupboard and sifting through them to see what was inside. The whole time her parents just watched on in amusement, as though everything she did just fell under the category of 'oh well, kids will be kids.'

When the grotty little thing wiped her nose on her hand and then wiped it on the couch right where I was sitting and they laughed at her, that was enough for me. I hid myself away in the bedroom until they left so that I wouldn't be tempted to dig a hole in the backyard and throw her in, followed closely by her parents.


Sitting in a bedroom listening to some horrible little shit yell at her dad that she wants some chocolate now gives you some time and incentive to think about the things that you really want out of life.


I can't say that I managed to work out what my long term plan for life is, but it did give me opportunity to think about some of the little things that I've always longed to do. There aren't that many of them, and they're mostly quite simple, but they're all things that I've thought about and wanted for a long time, so I know that they're probably not things i'm going to change my mind about wanting.


I've always wanted to learn another language. I've made a few attempts to get that to happen, and I think that soon I'll be taking a class with my sister to learn to speak Greek. My mum's background is Greek, and we always give her a hard time about not teaching us the language when we were little. At the moment, my knowledge of Greek is limited to how to say 'Nice Flowers' or 'Say hi to your Mum for me'. I'm hoping to improve on that.

I want to learn to swing dance. I've covered this before in a previous post, so I won't go into it, but basically the more I thought about it while I was writing that post, the more I realised that I really want to give it a go.

I want to travel. I've never been very good at travelling - i get pretty bad motion sickness, but I want to see the world. I've been trying to convince KJ for a few years now that the USA would be the perfect place for us to start out, but he's not really all that enthused about the idea. I think I might have finally convinced him that it would be a good idea by promising we can go to Memphis. He's a big Elvis fan.

I want to meet more people. I think it gets harder as you get older to make new friends, and the old ones tend to drift away a lot of the time without you realising it's happening. I don't want to find myself 10 years down the track from now without at least a handful of good friends.

I want to find myself without regrets in my old age. This is where the kids issue gets a little hazy for me - All the things that put me off wanting kids weighed up against the possibility of facing huge regret in later life for not having them. I'm not really sure where that leaves me on the issue. After this weekend though, I was ready to write off the idea of kids altogether. At the very least its shown me that I'm just not ready for kids yet - although will there ever be a time where I am?


Most of these are things that KJ and I have differing ideas about, which I guess is why a few of the simpler ones remain undone. I think I'm going to make a conscious effort to get through some of them sooner rather than later. And I guess in the meantime, I'm going to try to find someone with decent, well behaved kids so I can try to assess whether how I feel about kids has changed completely from two days with the super beast.


This entry is part of my ‘A-Z of Me’ Series. 26 Days of alphabetically ordered random crap about me and my life. You can read the rest here.