gen eXistential

I feel like I've been going through a mid-life crisis since I was about 16. The past few years my "self-discovery" has become such a preoccupation that I sometimes feel paralyzed. Finding my calling so to say is a near constant battle inside my brain. Photography retreats, food courses, pottery classes, now guitar lessons. I think I'm much more than the sum of my parts. Do I really want to write restaurant reviews on a blog? Do I want to go to culinary school or get my MFA? Or do I just want to stay at my job that I could do blindfolded? I know I'm not the next American Idol (nor want to be). Am I really good at anything? Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock. Call it an existential crisis.

Call it my friend Peter ("eating for brooklyn" 2/1/07 ) hitting the nail on the head for a lot of us 30 & early 40-somethings going on…what? It’s the “going on” that bedevils. It’s been going on so long that it feels like going nowhere. Hey, isn’t that a line from one of those songs that “for a split of a second [make] everything seem alright”? Probably. Find it, send it to me and you’ll get a prize.

Why this need to make a mark and be more than we are—flesh-formed consciousness trying to figure it out? Is it because we live in the metropolitan center of the universe? Are we nothing more than mercury-contaminated feeder fish caught in the charybdis of access, ambition, and accomplishment (cleverly clothed in hip irreverence of course), that keeps the real estate market tight in this town when every other place feels like someone just unstopped the tub? Who knew there was such a disparity between living and having a life?

I am losing my job in exactly three months. Tick tock. Haven’t sent out a resume in at least a week and a half. Been too busy: being online (now there’s a term just begging for major deconstruction); researching healthcare options for life post job-provided insurance (cause, as my boss says, if everyone had universal healthcare, no one would ever want to work); finishing the beginnings of stories for my master's, and just because; reading for my required theory class (Postcolonialism!); playing bad rhythm guitar in a basement-coffeehouse band whose members look like an assortment of Freaks and Geeks decades on; playing soccer 25 years after childhood dreams of backyard glory; wrangling with a family who doesn’t understand why I could be so selfish as to actually do what I like; trying to make time for friends, and yes, family; and, finally, loving on K. Loving on K is the best part everything, maybe the best part of everything I haven’t yet done.