(The Mayan calendar is cyclical, everybody. Don't panic.)
It's the 21st of January. A Saturday. I'm 34 years old and recovering from tonsillectomy, which I had on Tuesday. I'm very excited to have just eaten cheese puffs and flat 7Up.
I'm also fat and burdened with many of the doubts that beset those creeping up on middle age. But—as always—there's another way of looking at it. OK, there's no getting around that I'm fat. But the doubts thing. The middle age thing. It's an outdated notion, one that begins with our culture's perverse youth worship and culminates in the shiny red sports car of the 1980s businessman whose hair is slicked back with money itself.
I am anything but executive, so I don't really have anywhere to fall. Instead, I feel as though I'm still young, and my personality is just beginning to blossom; become real. I finally know what my values are, what I want for myself, what I like—and, by extension, what I don't like, what I have no time for.
The burdened part has to do with a restlessness that comes from the realization that life really is short. When you're young, you know you're mortal and that life is finite, but you don't really understand it until something happens to wake you up to the reality, or time passes and you just can't ignore that reality anymore. But instead of feeling frustrated with the realization that time is limited, I feel energized. It's rather like the energy a procrastinator feels when they've put off writing the paper and the deadline is approaching.
So this is my new blog. It really is a midlife-crisis diary by virtue of insisting that it's not. My new blog, in which I hope to flesh out some of my thoughts and dip back into writing, something I've avoided since I finished my creative writing thesis almost two years ago. Let's see where this goes.
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