Reality just shows up sometimes, doesn't it?

Photo by J. Sony - 04.03.06

Standing atop a condo building in Chicago, just a few miles from the Loop, I realized how very different my world has become as compared to the world of my Notre Dame roommates. Now, this isn’t a critique or some retrospective psychoanalytical musing on the path not taken or the path taken, or even the less popular but probably more often uttered “There’s a path? I didn’t see a path.” No, I just noticed that my Notre Dame friends, the ones living in Chicago primarily, have placed themselves on the path to 30-something-hood, with the spouses and the dogs and the kids, where as I, and many of my Columbus pals (and, admittedly, a couple of wayward Domers), have a definite 20-something, post-collegiate lifestyle, even though some of us are creeping up on 30 while, even still, some are looking at that crisis-inducing benchmark in their rearview.

Where am I in the creeping? I turned twenty-seven on Saturday (my blog profile has conveniently updated this stat, I’ve noticed). And it’s not being a year older that has me all contemplative -- we’re getting older everyday, so Saturday I was one day older than I was on Friday. Now, if we spontaneously aged an entire year all at once on a certain predetermined day each and every time the Earth revolved around the Sun, now that would cause me some anxiety. Point here is: I was struck by the sheer dichotomy between these two worlds in which I live and, more so, inspired to figure out to which I belong.

Though I’m getting older and have been away from the gleam of the Dome for nearly five years, this weekend as I looked at those skyscrapers, I felt like I was getting younger, or worse - a bit confounded. I spent a nice solid chunk of time with some wonderful friends and noticed how grown up they’ve all become. Let’s be clear on this - they still like to have a raucous time and flick off the camera during an attempted candid sweep, but their daily lives revolve around corporate America, earning their PhD’s, planning weddings and group vacations, or having children. And I’m not at all suggesting that a person needs marriage, property, or progeny to feel like they have used their time on this Earth proficiently -- but am I wrong in thinking that by now I should have some idea of how I actually plan to use my time? They seem to have it worked out. Why don't I?

On one of my old posts from myspace.com (which, incidentally, inspired the title of this blog), I wrote the following:

The Devil walks the Earth in many forms, but the one that he takes for me is complacency. Too often I look up from my hurried life, which is hurried by things that in the end are not the things I wish to be doing (the day job, admin stuff for the theater, working the room like a politician because I feel some uncontrollable need to play host to the world), and I realize that I haven't moved. This summer it'll be three years since I left L.A. (I left because I had let complacency take over my life there). But for everything I've done here - all the adventures, the risks, the life I lead - only a small part of it (my friends and family, my writing, Mary) feels like the path to something better. The rest is the vertigo. I realize it. But then it's like it's just an observation - I'm standing still and the world is rushing forward, shifting and moving, and I don't even feel it sometimes. This realization for me has led not to the hastening collapse Dan so eloquently explained, but to a rebuilding of the foundations and a manifest destiny kind of plan that will, by the end of 2007, decide my future. The fork is coming.

Like many of my peers, I’m thinking so much about the future and its infinite possibilities that I’m not living in the present and more importantly, I’m not preparing properly for any of the paths with lie before me. And even the life we live every day can change on us without as much as a warning (though the warnings are sometimes there if we really want to see them). I won’t get into the cryptic sentence above just yet (that’s for another post sometime in a week or so), but lets just say that reality just shows up sometimes, doesn’t it?

My birthday weekend gave me more to think about than I was anticipating. Lots of questions. But as I gazed out over the beautiful skyline of the windy city, one of the only things that seemed certain was this: I’m going to write this year. A lot. I have a number of projects lined up to wrap by June’s end and then three more tentatively planned for the remainder of the year. And this will be my test -- a self-imposed writing aptitude test. Of my tribe of friends (to use one of Mary’s phrases), the ones here in Columbus (and a few scattered about trying to find their own paths) dream of being writers or actors in Hollywood or on Broadway. We talk a lot about it. But what are we doing? I’ve written stories as far back as I can recall. I have an unfinished novel that I started when I was nine, another from high school, and a slew of archived plays and scripts that I dust off from time to time and then repack gently as if transporting fossilized remains of a forgotten beast.

I’m done repacking.

While traveling through South Bend this weekend, I was visiting with Jac and Andy and Jac said, “this is the year of the writer”. I liked that. She gave me a writer’s market book for novel and short story submissions. And the theme of writing tools was prevalent this birthday. From flash drives (thank you, Beautiful!) to a new chair to a dry-erase board and a plethora of gifts that my wonderful friends bestowed upon me, I have no excuses to not be writing. There’s now a proper writing office in my house where I’m going to begin my writing career -- or at least I’m going to wear out a keyboard or two tryin’. That little room’s just itchin’ to be a $27.00 tour in about a hundred years.

Speaking of writing, I’m going to wrap this up for today and focus on writing of a different sort. As I said earlier, having a birthday doesn’t make you any older than you were yesterday (except for the technicality of being involved with yet another of Earth’s rotations) and as great change takes a bit of perseverance and time, I know I may not be able to figure out overnight where I want to end up or even which path I want to travel first; but I can do something to reach that place where you look up and the skyscrapers no longer confound you. Like my post said, the next year and a half or so will determine the many years that follow it. I don’t know where this is going or what I even really want -- but I’m looking forward to finding out.

It’s gonna be one hell of a story.