so much beauty in the world

There's far too much going on in my head to write down. I like to think of my face as being like the underside of a duck: you can't see it happening, but beneath the surface there's two little legs pumping like mad.

That was an appalling analogy, but you get the gist.

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I have this friend who's very proud of his cynicism. He's big on that whole "I'm so jaded and world weary" thing, when really he's as sheltered as a snail in a bunker (now that was a better piece of imagery for y'all). It irritates me, when you see people as young as me and my peers, who like to act like they've been there, done that and come out the other end seeing this corrupt and futile world for what it is. Come on guys, we're 17. We've never even had full-time jobs, puberty's still lurking about us like a persistent smell (simile strike three!); don't pretend like you know the ways of the world.

I'm very aware of the fact that I'm sheltered. I've been hardly anywhere, in the scheme of things I've done hardly anything. A lot of the A-level students at my college look down on our schoolmates who went out after their GCSEs and got jobs. There's this attitude of "Oh look at you, you're too thick to get qualifications so you're out having babies and working and getting council flats, you poor things." It's a load of shit, quite frankly. The snobbery in the education system is disgusting, like on the bus I take every morning, where the tech students and the 6th form students sit and snipe at each other. We're boffs, they're thickies. No, we've chosen to academic qualifications, they're doing practical courses. That's the way to deal with a manual labour shortage, make people who don't get A-levels feel like retards, woohoo!

The point is, besides my beef with higher education, that all the students on that bus in the morning are doing the same thing. We're delaying adulthood. We know that, eventually, we're gonna have to get out there and live independently and get jobs and work for a living. We don't want to yet. Yeah, we want to learn, we want an education, but one of the reasons we want it is because it's a few more years when we can evade the real world. I don't want to go and slog at Tesco full-time, I want to have fun at uni and be a student and enjoy a couple more responsibility free years before I'm forced to grow up. That's the truth.

So who's got more right to be cynical and world weary? Me? Doing my A-levels, financially supported by relatively well-off parents (despite employment issues, still comfortable), all set to go to university because I've been blessed with the brains to do so, or a girl I went to school with, pregnant in a council flat with no boyfriend and a dead-end job at McD's? Me and my mates, we have our problems, but we're living in bubbles. We're still like kids, y'know?

Even so, I'm different to how I was a year and a half ago, when I started college. I can't look after a kid, or run a household, or hold down a job, or live like an adult, but I've had to learn, in my own way. And it's really changed me, I don't appreciate things like I used to. It's not that I'm cynical, it's just that all the things that used to floor me I take for granted now.

I've always been one for the American Beauty tangents. You know, the old "most beautiful thing I've ever seen", staring at a paper bag for twenty minutes and suddenly being aware of a great benevolent force trick. I was more aware, I think, of the beauty in every little thing I can see, and the wonder of creation that used to hit me every day before I became a Christian and took the fact that there was a benevolent creator for granted.

We were watching Donnie Darko in Film studies (another fantastic film) and I had my first American Beauty moment in ages. There was sunshine coming through the blinds and, because the room was in total darkness, it was really noticeable. It was kind of muted, but it skidded off the desks and on to people's faces and it was moving because of the trees in the way. I was sat there, looking round at everyone's faces with the sunlight and shadow and the reflections from the film on the screen and I just felt really happy, it was just a really lovely moment.

It's nice, especially at the moment, to know that I can still feel like that, for no reason at all other than the world's a very pretty place to be sometimes.