First, I apologize for missing the past two days of Blogmas. As you can imagine, trying to blog every single day can get pretty taxing, especially if you’re already on a full-time work schedule and all you want to do at the end of every work day is nothing.

The other day, I was talking to a friend at work, and he asked me what my work schedule was now that school is out for winter break. When I told him I’m basically working 8 to 5 everyday, the normal full time work schedule, he was in disbelief, and followed his shock with “Wow, you’re such an adult.” To this, I shrunk into my chair and exclaimed, “I AM NOT,” even though I am well aware that at this point I’m pretty much well underway in my foray into adulthood. While I am assuming all of the normal adult responsibilities pretty well – things like paying bills, doing taxes, and working full time – there are still so many things that I am bad at as an adult, as I’m sure many other budding adults are bad at as well. Hopefully you all can relate to some of this stuff, because there’s no such thing as a perfect adult – at least that’s what I’m trying to tell myself to feel better. Anyway, here are a few things I’m bad at as an adult.

1. Making my bed

I was raised to make my bed every morning either immediately after waking up, or after I was finished getting ready for school – as long as my bed was made before I walked out the door. I’ve done a pretty good job at making sure that my bed was made every morning for the first 20 years of my life. But one day, I was running late for school, and so I just left my bed in the state it was in after waking up. When I got back from school that day, being used to always coming back to a made bed, I was pretty shocked at the disarrayed state of my sheets, and for a bit, my mind felt as disorganized as my bed was. But when it finally came time to sleep, I realized how easy it was to simply get in bed, instead of having to undo my sheets as if I was opening a giant present. The thought finally came to me – “Why don’t I just leave my bed a mess EVERY morning?” I’m proud to say, though, that this habit did not last long, as my mom’s nagging voice kept echoing in my head every time I tried leaving my room every morning with a messy bed. It just didn’t feel right to me, and I legitimately felt like I couldn’t concentrate on anything else during the day knowing I would come home to a messy bed. I also realized that making my bed really doesn’t take that long. But I will say that there are mornings where I am too lazy to make my bed, and so I just leave it in dishevelment. It is, after all, way easier to get in that night when I’m about to go to sleep.

2. Cooking dinner

Cooking is something I’ve tried so hard to get into a regular habit of doing, especially now that I’m living on my own, and getting takeout can burn a serious hole in anyone’s wallet. At the previous house that I was living in, I was living with about 10 other people, all of whom had relatively the same schedule, and so getting to use the kitchen was like playing the lottery. There were some nights where I just didn’t feel like waiting for whoever to finish using the kitchen, especially since there were points where I’d be waiting literally all night before the kitchen was free to use. Eventually, I just lost all motivation to cook – even if it was as simple as just microwaving something – and ended up just buying dinner on my way back from school or work that day. I then tried making it a point to just cook in large quantities on the weekends so I have something to eat for every meal during the week, but when there’s screaming children running all around the house all day everyday, any chances of me leaving my room went way down. On a lucky night, I’d be able to use the kitchen immediately when I got back to the house, and always made sure I made enough food to last me until the next day. There were also days where I wouldn’t get back until past 10 or 11 pm, well past the point of being unmotivated to do anything other than sleep. Now that I’ve moved out of that (godforsaken) house, I do have a kitchen that’s free for me to use. But again, I don’t get back until much later into the night because of obligations I have to take care of, but on occasion, I do muster up the motivation to cook my dinner for that night and lunch for the next day. As I’m typing all of this out, I’m realizing that this all sounds very excuse-y, so I’m definitely going to try and make a bigger effort to cook dinner most, if not every, night.

3. Doing laundry regularly

Again, this is something that I’ve been bad at partly because of my hectic schedule, but mostly due to laziness. During the week, doing laundry isn’t exactly number one on my list of priorities, but my weekends should be open enough to get at least one load of laundry done. I used to be so diligent in making sure I got my laundry done, making sure that every other weekend I would do it, and on a particularly hectic month, I’d make sure it got done at least once that month. But lately, I’ve been so busy with school, studying, work, and extra curricular activities, laundry has always been put on the back burner. I only realize how big of a problem it is when my underwear drawer is running close to empty, and all of the socks in there are all the mismatched ones that got lost in previous laundry excursions. It also doesn’t really help that I have to set aside an entire day to do laundry since it takes such an ungodly amount of time. Now that I’m on break, though, there are no more excuses not to do laundry on the weekends, especially since I’ll be going home next week and would like to get it done before then. Ok, I promise I’ll do my laundry this weekend.

4. Putting my dishes away

While we’re on the topic of chores, another thing that I’m really bad at is putting my dishes away. I have the mind to at least wash my dishes after using them – a sink full of unwashed dishes is the bane of my existence. In fact, I make it more of a point to wash my dishes than I do to actually put them away afterwards. Does my dish rack eventually get full? Yes. But it’s just so much easier to get a plate from the dish rack than to spend the two seconds opening a cabinet and choosing a plate to use – how efficient is that? Answer: It’s not. Yes, I realize that other people need to use the dish rack to put newly washed dishes in, but even that isn’t enough motivation for me to put away my dry dishes. It’s gotten to such a ridiculous point that instead of taking the time to actually stack my clean dishes in my cupboard, I’m reorganizing the dishes already in the dish rack to make room for the dishes I’m about to wash (that I have no intention of putting away).

5. Anything that has to do with the phone

I’m horrible at making phone calls, and I’m also bad at answering my phone. Unless you are my sister or one of my parents, if you’ve ever called me, there was always that brief moment of hesitation about whether or not I should answer it. You’d think that after working a job where my primary responsibility was to answer the office phone and talk to angry people that I wouldn’t be so averse to using my own phone for phone calls, but that job did absolutely nothing to numb my feelings toward answering the phone. Whenever my phone rings, all I can think about is that awkward part of the end of the phone call where you’re trying to decide how to end the phone call, and it gets infinitely more awkward if the person on the other end is thinking about it also, and so you just end up not hanging up, suffocating in a cloud of awkwardness – it’s just way too much to handle.

Another thing that I’m bad at is listening or responding to voice mails. The reason behind this is mostly because I don’t have a voicemail box set up, and haven’t in over two years. Believe me, I had every intention of setting up a voicemail box with my old phone, but every time I tried to, I needed a password that I didn’t have, and didn’t have the wherewithal to contact an AT&T representative to get that password – BECAUSE THAT WOULD ENTAIL TALKING ON THE PHONE, WHICH I HATE. I know what you’re thinking – What if there’s an emergency? What if someone needs to reach you? WHAT IF AN EMPLOYER IS TRYING TO CONTACT YOU, WALT. I realize I walk the fine line that is potentially hindering me from my dream job, but to those concerns, I have a simple solution – I just make sure I answer my phone every time it rings, even if I’m in class. This may seem contradictory to the first part of this point when I said I hated talking on the phone, but note that I said that I just would rather not talk on the phone – I do it anyway, because I have to sometimes, especially since I (still) don’t have my voicemail set up. But anyway, I really should get that set up soon.

So those are some of the things that I’m really bad at as an adult. My hope is that now that these are all out in the open, I’ll make more of a conscious effort to be better at doing these things. What are some of your bad habits? Leave em in the comments so I don’t feel like such a goldbrick.