There must be some kind of way out of here, said the joker to the thief

If all goes according to plan, I will be moving out this fall and going to live in a town three and a half hours away from my home. If all does not go according to plan, I will hopefully be doing that anyway.

How I feel about this depends on my mood. Sometimes, I think that I just can't wait to move out, and that it will be the happiest day of my life. Other times, I want to cry and I feel sad and guilty because I'm going to be leaving my parents.

Typically, I feel somewhere between those two extremes. Today happens to be one of the days when I feel as though those five months can't go by quick enough. Okay, it's not quite that bad, but I am feeling as though it will be wonderful to get out of here and live on my own. Yesterday, I was told that I am staying out too late and that it's not safe to be out at 4:00 am... Maybe that's true, but I'm 21 years old, I'm NOT stupid about that sort of thing, I never go to bars, parties, or do that sort of thing. I know that "bad things can always happen," but when you're 21 you don't really want lectures from your parents about coming home early.

All that the lecturing has done is to make me absolutely determined that when I do move out, I am going to take the first chance I get to stay out all night, on purpose. Maybe I'll go to a bar until it closes, then go to a 24 hour restaurant, maybe I'll just hang out at a friend's house, but one way or another, I will stay out until the sun dawns on the next day. And best of all? My parents will have no idea!

Don't get me wrong, my parents could be MUCH worse; they aren't extremely strict, they're nosy. By nature, I am a secretive person, and their nosiness just causes me irritation.

I don't really know how it's going to be when I move out. People adapt to things very quickly, I know that from experience, so I might get used to it without a problem. I'm thinking that it's going to be difficult at first, and that I'm going to spend a lot of time crying and feeling guilty, but then I'll get used to it and LOVE IT. I think it's going to be great to have my own place and be able to do my own thing without having to answer to anybody. I'll be able to listen to my music, keep the sound on with my video games, turn off any phones that annoy me, I won't have any animals to be dealing with, and so on...

I think I will be lonely sometimes, though. I'll be going somewhere new, and I won't know very many people. In a way, that's good - new friends, getting away from the old ones who I want to get rid of, completely starting over - but in a way, it's going to be really hard. I'm picturing myself sitting in an apartment all the time, unless of course I end up having to live in the dorms. I don't know if I will be that unhappy, though; I am a solitary person and I am typically very happy alone. A lot of my favorite things are done alone: reading, playing computer games, wasting time on the internet, writing...

It will be hard to be without friends, though. Some weekends I get really bored and listless and just want to go out and have fun.

But I'll get used to it. In fact, I might get where I like it so much that I become a hermit. Don't think that I haven't thought about it; sometimes I think that the best thing to do would be to go and build a cabin in the woods somewhere as far away from "civilization" as I could get.