Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 535 Easy(ish) Steps (Revised Edition)

2018·14.62 MB·english

by  Kelly Williams Brown

Copyright
Copyright © 2013, 2018 by Kelly Williams Brown
Cover design by Brigid Pearson. Cover photo by William Bragg. Cover
copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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Grand Central Life & Style
Hachette Book Group
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Originally published in hardcover and ebook by Grand Central Publishing
in May 2013.
First Revised Edition: March 2018
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Grand Central Life & Style name and logo are trademarks of Hachette
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All line drawings by the author.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017959713
ISBNs: 978-1-5387-2913-7 (revised trade pbk.), 978-1-4555-1689-6
(ebook)
E3-20180724-JV-PC
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
A Note on the Second Edition
Introduction
1. Get Your Mind Right
Accepting non-Singular-Seahorse-ness, leaving behind things that are
Not a Valid Long-Term Plan, and the value of Real Talk.
2. Domesticity
Find an apartment, obtain cute but inexpensive furniture, clean
effectively, and generally avoid living in an unlivable hellhole.
3. Cooking
Ramen can only take you so far, so stock a kitchen, learn the basics,
and maybe, someday, consider throwing a dinner party.
4. Fake It Till You Make It
The world only sees your outermost layer (unless you tell it about your
HPV, in which case it’ll know about your insides, too). Make that layer
presentable.
5. Get a Job
Find a job, negotiate for your salary, dress for not-sleeping-with-co-
workers success, and shut down office creepers.
6. Money
Live cheaply, celebrate your poverty, and strive toward the day when
forty dollars doesn’t seem like too much to pay for pants.
7. Maintenance
You can have nice things—if you treat them like they are, in fact, nice
things.
8. Friends and Neighbors
Ask people on friend-dates, deal with neighborly sex noises, and give
apologies worth accepting.
9. Love
Dates versus non-dates, fighting like a grown-up, and how to tolerate
his or her unbearable friends.
10. Times Were Tough
Cope gracefully and eventually move past emergencies large and small
via the resilience of the human spirit and the power of safety pins.
11. Families
These people changed your diapers, so you owe them one. Convince
them your (metaphorical) diapers no longer need changing.
12. Conclusion
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Kelly Williams Brown
Newsletters
To Barbara, Joel, and Barbara
A NOTE ON THE SECOND EDITION
Dear Reader,
Feel free to skip this part. Any of the book, really, but this little section
especially, because it has just one concrete, useful life strategy, and here it
is: Pour liquids from one container into the other over the sink; pour solids
over a garbage can. Assuming the solid in question is, say, sugar and not
your collection of loose sapphires, in which case, maybe just pour over a
big empty bowl.
So here is a story: When I was twenty-six, I was a reporter in Salem,
Oregon, which is my real-life Pawnee. My beat was events and music and
nightlife and any of the things human beings do, not because they have to
but because they want to. I also wrote a weekly column of whatever
nonsense I came up with, like crowning the cutest baby animal at the Polk
County Fair, or writing a musical about the time everyone thought we were
finally getting a Trader Joe’s but it was a mean trick, or spending an
afternoon “solving” “mysteries.”
Sample Mystery: Wait, we have an entire store dedicated to clocks? What? Findings:
Yeah, we do, and it has a whole bunch of clocks. These clocks are all going their own
way in terms of ticking and chiming; they were supervised by an intense owner who
answered all my questions with one word, then watched me as I moved among his
precious timepieces. In fact, this experience introduced more questions than answers,
but they remain unanswered; I couldn’t spend more than twenty minutes there. It is
alarming to step out of your Parks and Rec life and into a David Lynch movie.
People—again, not just my mother!—asked me if I “was ever going to
write a book,” which is sort of like asking an aspiring actor if they were
“ever going to star in a movie.” Plus, I had no idea what I could possibly
write a book about. I lack the focus to write the kind of dense nonfiction
that takes a decade of research (A Cohort of Scoundrels, Scholars, and
Princes: How Truman’s Forestry Department Changed Everything and
Everyone, Forever [and What It Tells Us about Sexuality and the American
Dream]. I lack the creativity to write fiction; every time I do, I end up just
telling one of my own anecdotes with my name changed to Betsy. The
world does not need my memoir. Plus, at the time, I did not have a
computer, nor the money to buy one. Challenges!
One afternoon, in an attempt to get the community to basically write my
column for me, I posed a question on Facebook: What concrete, tangible
skills should you have by the age of thirty? There were a lot of very
thoughtful replies, though, sadly, not enough to make a column out of.
Then, a little while later, a friend complimented me on giving good advice
and said maybe I should write an advice book. I felt, based on the way my
fridge smelled at that very moment, that I was in no place to tell anyone
anything about how to live.
When I was twenty-two, my friend Rachel (who, at the time, was
twenty-seven and capable and wise and generous and lived in a tasteful
apartment with actual furniture) gave me a wonderful gift. We were driving
back to the newsroom of the small Mississippi town where we were both
reporters, and… well, now, I can’t remember what problem I was crying
about. There were a lot of possibilities.
Maybe I was lamenting that I had no real furniture, as mine was made of
particleboard and had literally dissolved when I moved during a rainstorm.
Maybe I was sobbing because I was only a few months into my first grown-
up job and, while I was doing what I had always dreamed of doing, I was
also consistently screwing every single last thing up, and felt like I had
tricked my editor into hiring me, and any moment I would be caught and
exposed for the fraud I was. Maybe I was agonizing over my long-term
relationship with a truly wonderful guy who, I knew, was not right for me
and vice versa. Maybe she had just treated me to a Sonic Cherry Limeade
because my take-home pay was $610 every two weeks and I had student
loans and my post–Hurricane Katrina rent was a bargain at $450, which
meant I was always overdrawing my bank account and relied on what I
called the Walmart Check-Bouncin’ Grift. In short, I was twenty-two and
my life was nothing but chaos and shambles, and it showed no signs of ever
being otherwise.