A varied day of work and small pleasures. A line from a Colm Toibin essay made me smile:
I had planned to be in Seville for Easter 1991, mainly because I get very depressed in Ireland on Good Friday when the pubs close all day and the sky is low and the churches are full.
Today, too, was a day with a low sky and being here, rather than somewhere else, brought about a certain feeling of restlessness. Between calls with lawyers and answering simple questions, I was reading about the career of Gordon Ramsay, whose shine is (for me) beginning to dim. This in turn led me to lists of Michelin-starred restaurants and fancy restaurants in general. Amazing how vast swaths of the Earth have nothing, it seems, in the way of culinary quality while a few regions have all the best items – the traveler wishing to explore the edges of the map but retain some sense of culinary intrigue is either out of luck, about to spend many thousands of dollars on a trip, or lives in either Basque country or Japan.
After my escapist gustatory journey, I dove back into the piles of unread material around me. I have recently been stirred up by the arrival of two used books, soon to be mutilated so they can each donate a single page to my wall of favorite pages. The overwhelming sense that my wall should by now be impossibly full, that I am missing not just something but many things taunts and shames me whenever I engage in this exercise. I do my best to catch up with what I have missed, but then I find that the distance of even a little time (weeks, months) adds a certain something to the process. Headlines about child detainees in ICE detention (or concentration camps, if you prefer), forgotten book reviews that can now be read again for a new delightful turn of phrase, inspired thoughts left unrecorded.
Time, or lack thereof, has been on my mind of late. This is strange because in most ways I have never (productively) had so much of it – I am employed at a remote job in a role I can essentially keep to 9-5, and with C gainfully employed after a tough period of joblessness, we have a budget that gives us room to relax if not lean into our DINK status (weddings to plan, medical debts to pay, etc.). Then again, perhaps it is quite natural to have these sort of realizations only when you have the room to step back and take stock. I worry, or perhaps not worry so much as see, life barreling towards me. There’s not a thing wrong with that, and indeed I am fortunate that many of the events (most, I hope) in my near future are those I chose myself, quite happily. Wedding, my career arc, children, moving, and so on. As I was letting myself dig back into all the texts I mentioned above, I found myself returning to this idea of being to write authoritatively on something non-fiction. To me, the boring but powerfully symbolic topics of pensions came to mind almost immediately, and I indulged myself with a fantasy about a well-received article on such topic, written by me, appearing to many plaudits in the Inquirer. Even in my fantasy I know the subject is too boring to be consumed neat, so I watered it down with the premise of “I’m leaving Philadelphia, here’s why, and here’s why I was ALWAYS leaving” or something to that effect. I was snapped out of my smug reverie by the realization that this was, in fact, true. I have lived in this city for a decade, and I love it, but while for much of that time I was working on the premise of “some years yet” I don’t think there was ever a time where “forever, or as long as I can take it” was the plan. But was I therefore implicitly on a trajectory that I would have vigorously denied if asked about aloud? Was it always to be “fun single life downtown” followed by “married life in the ‘burbs”? Because I am equally sure that was never my goal, but I struggle to articulate, then, what the goal was for all that time.
This train of thought once again shows the undue influence of today’s materials. (Yet another problem – I’m becoming that predictable boor in the bar in Good Will Hunting who tries to impress people by regurgitating what he has learned most recently.) Perhaps it was the Ramsay clip where he moans about how he ought to receive his third Michelin star at age 33 (it ended up taking until he was 34). Colm Toibin, in the piece above, writes about going to Seville in 1991 – he had already written a novel inspired by his earlier travels in Spain, published in 1990. By my math he would have been around 34 when he wrote that. I saw a headline recently that the average unicorn founder started their company at age 34. I recall very distinctly having a conversation with a friend, probably seven years ago or so, about our planned career arcs. We were and are in very different fields, but we spoke with great confidence about how you need to be on track to meet your goals by 30, or else you won’t achieve anything much. I am now 33, and while I know that wrestling with this question is normal, I still cannot help but asking myself what it means when you aren’t where you think you would be, even if you realize you never had idea of where to go in the first place.
A long way to say I’m afraid of cognitive dissonance.
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I know that wrestling with this question is normal, I still cannot help but
asking myself what it means when you aren’t where you think you would be, even
if you realize you never had a fixed idea of where to go in the first place.
A long way to say I am afraid of cognitive dissonance.
smq.world 