Phantasmagoria, Inflation and the General Melee
So apparently, not only have I made it to thirty, but much like the experiment of Dr. Frankenstein, I have managed to to awkwardly stumble my way with a somewhat vacant stare almost to thirty one.
Lesson here – keep static numbers out of your blog naming conventions if relevance is important to you.
But as this is my annual reflective post I will mention that in this lackadasically phantasmagoric year – realism has been a bit chucked out the window, or at least been brought into question – so perhaps thirty one isn’t really thirty one after all . . .
Yeah nice try.
This year was a liminal one – lots of change, lots of plans and lots of the past bubbling up – all recombining in strange threads through daily existence – almost convincingly enough for me to give Proust a try. Yet alas, solipcism is a slippery slope and perhaps some slopes are best unexplored.
The year has been full of chance meetings, new friendships, old friendships reappearing, new habits, combining with old habits, and a strange house of mirrors that seems to be illuminating every corner of every preconceived notion I might have once entertained. Things have moved quickly, but also not at all as I spent untold hours huddled over the rather extensive and extensively dry contents of the CFA curriculum.
It’s a bit disturbing when wisdom comes from JPOP (those of you who have ever listened to JPOP know what I mean), but 理由なく始まりは訪れ
終わりはいつだって理由を持つ…
Beginnings do come at random, but endings always have a meaning. How we choose to interact with what comes into our lives does say something about who we are and is the only thing we can possibly change.
Some things are closing - I have now completed everything I set out to do before/right when Lucas was born and he will start school in a month. I have thus far done what I said I would do and that in itself has been its own magic lantern impressing upon the rather chaotic timeline a sort of personal stamp of loosely directed grit.
Perhaps I am unique in that I don’t expect order, even from my best-laid plans. If I have gained any wisdom in the ten years since I could first (legally) drink (and those of you who were present for that tequila-fest please remain silent), it’s that you might as well just start coloring, because the lines are going to change anyway. I keep getting asked where am I going . . . and where/what do I want to be . . . but to me these are questions that would only answer if I wanted to be wrong. I can pick a direction, but the availability of road and the passability of the terrain will have much more influence on my success than any amount of sheer will.
They say stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Thus, I have decided my one true goal is to try to avoid doing things repeatedly and expecting different results. You may laugh now, but anyone with kids knows this is easier said than done. Perhaps not the lofty aspirations of a future nobel laureate or at least household dictator, but seems goal enough for thirty one.
And besides, in a world where you can walk into a grocery store and get charged $2826.32 for one head of broccoli (which by the way did not seem to be particularly remarkable in any way upon consumption), things are not always what they seem so clinging to anything too tightly seems a bit of an exercise in futility. And thus perhaps I would rather just wander . . . but if I can define a few lines . . . preferrably on a beach somewhere . . . in peace and quiet . . . with a fruity drink . . . with an umbrella . . . the ones that actually open and close, because there’s always something amusing about a wee-little unbrella made of paper, which pretty much defeats the purpose of umbrellas . . . and makes you wonder how an umbrella made its way into a drink as garnish anyway . . . which makes you wonder why you would try to protect a liquid, from liquid, with paper.
See it’s not just me. It’s the general melee.
