Density

It’s been a crappy day. And I’ve been Facebook-stalking. Nothing makes you feel crappier after a crappy day than looking at pictures of people your age pretending to have a fulfilling life. Sometimes you find people, after so many years, and everything just makes sense. The always smiling dreamy-eyed girl who’s now at the Divinity School. The drama queen who became an actress. The serious independent girl in horn-rimmed glasses who became a lesbian. It’s like they went through life on this unfaltering course and became exactly what they were supposed to be. Destiny. And if it sounds like I’m whining, maybe it’s because I was destined to be a whiner since birth. I'm Russian, I'm Jewish, I'm a woman, and all the cards are stacked against me. Time to embrace my destiny.

The Month that Disappeared

So everything was going along swimmingly. I was productively writing every month, diligently calculating whether I’d be able to squeeze in 10 or 15 blog entries in November, mentally drafting my witty retorts to Salman Rushdie at fashionable New York parties, when BAM! It’s December 21, and my blog isn’t even in my browser cache anymore.

The whole month has been a haze. All I remember is going to the mall a lot. At any given moment, Jingle Bells was probably stuck in my head. After all that, I still don’t have presents for my family. Oh, and I got a year older. Welcome to the LATE twenties. Tick tock. According to the unwritten schedule I made when I was twelve, I should have been attending those glitzy New York parties five years ago. But those five years somehow flew by, too.

Time’s a bitch. We’re in a such a fight right now.

Elsinore

There are men of thought, and there are men of action. In the extreme case, the two sets do not overlap. If you think hard enough, you realize that all action is futile because we’re all going to die anyway, and it’s much better to stay home and watch reruns of House. And if you’re out acting, well, you obviously didn’t think it through enough.

Or maybe the two can coexist inside a single person, and only clever intellectual maneuvering can keep the two sides from a complete détente of depression. *

I have devolved into a bizarre and tangled metaphor. To summarize: I think too much. I act not enough. I am not sure if the same “I” is responsible for both, whether the concept of “I” even means anything, and whether any of it even matters.

See, I overthought again.

* Yes, I realize that Hamlet already said that. I’m not going to quote the speech because, well, I’m not in high school anymore. Because of that selfish Shakespeare, all the rest of us have left to do is regurgitate his thoughts in slightly more modern Modern English.

** Much less abstract entry coming up, as soon as I wade out of the philosophical labyrinth. I’m thinking concrete nouns, actions verbs, visual imagery, the works. I might even throw in some pictures.

So it turns out that everyone wants to be a writer. I was recently informed that everyone and their mom has a blog, and therefore blogs are lame. Also, Gene Weingarten's polls reveal that most people would choose to be a writer if they could make their current salary doing it. Of course, you should question the scientific validity of a poll answered by people who read the musings of a deranged humor columnist for fun. For example, I know plenty of well-adjusted techies who spend their free hours reading tech blogs. And they are perfectly happy with their day jobs.

Haha, I kid. No, of course, like all techies, they are completely miserable, and spend all their waking hours (that are not taken up by working and reading tech blogs) dreaming up schemes of how to continue doing exactly what they are doing now somewhere else.

Along a similar vein, it turns out that Julia Roberts dreams of being a housewife, housewives dream of being Julia Roberts, a corporate drone dreams of being a writer, and writers dream of steady employment.

I would say there’s no hope for humanity, but I’m trying this whole staying positive thing. So instead, let’s all congratulate Julia Roberts. She’s had a rough run, but I believe that if she really tries, she can achieve her ambitious dream of being a housewife.

My sister left a message on my Facebook wall today. I quote:

i'm sitting here, alone, inhaling a cocktail of mocha coffee, yogurt pretzels, advil, emo, and sour patch kids. must be friday.

People who don’t know my sister would read that as a cry for attention. People who do know my sister would shrug because everything my sister does is a cry for attention. They’d realize that someone who really needs the attention of their own sister could find better ways to get it than leaving a posting for the world to see. As an ostensibly smart person, my sister is aware of the invention of the telephone machine. However, these people lack my confused maternal instincts towards my sister, so they wouldn’t pick up the phone immediately like I did. Plus, given the note, I figured I had about a 5% chance of finding my sister alone, as promised, which means that she might be able to talk to me without distraction for at least 2 minutes, after which she’d inevitably run into someone more interesting to talk to. I was liking my odds.

Of course, statistics never did me any favors. When I called, I got a distracted hello and laughing in the background. She then talked to her friends for a couple minutes while I scrutinized my cuticles. She said she’d call me back.

In any case, consider my attention granted.

After only a week in Italy, everything became clear. After the fog of jet lag had lifted, I saw my purpose in life. I realized that I was made to live on gelato and champagne, basking in the autumn sun of the Mediterranean. Since I was a little girl, it had always been my sacred dream to spend money like it can never run out, drink like I never have to get up early in the morning, and wax philosophically with the lightheartedness of someone who never had to make a real decision. All those years of searching and agonizing, when the answer was staring at me all along from the glossy cover of Luxury Travel: I was born to be an independently wealthy tourist.

I’m sure that if I had taken one of those career tests in high school, it would helpfully point me to Rich Tourist, right between Rice Grower and Rickshaw Driver. My teacher would congratulate me, shake my hand, and send me to the career distribution office right next to the school library. The secretary to the dean of career distribution, a brassy middle aged woman with supernaturally red hair, would crack a smile when she saw my paperwork. “Rich tourist, huh. I pulled mid-level bureaucrat, and I never looked back. I tell ya, they really look out for you around here.” Then she’d reach down into her desk and jangle innumerable keys, all the while snapping her gum and winking at me mysteriously. She’d then emerge with a burlap sack with a big green $ sign on it. “Well, good luck. Not that you’ll need it. I tell ya, they really look out for you around here.” And then I’d be off to the airport for my first flight to Rio de Janeiro.

I must have been out sick that day. If anyone has an extra life's savings lying around and wants to make a little girl's simple dream come true, send it my way.

My boss’s barely audible phone conversation in the next cubicle was punctuated with a long sigh.

“I just thought I’d get to use my creativity here,” she said.

I looked up from my solitaire game to listen.

“Instead, we’re all just so busy, we barely even have time to look up anymore.”

Another long sigh.

My own phone rang. I stared at the blinking button for a few seconds and sent it to voicemail.

“Oh well, at least I’m not too far from retirement. I’m really looking forward to that.” She let out one of her big hearty Midwestern laughs.

I looked back at my screen. The bright fall afternoon sunlight cast a glare as I strained to see the time. One more hour until I can go home.

Although I aspire to look deep into the vortex of reality and capture the shining nugget of truth in a well-turned phrase on a daily basis, all my brain capacity is currently occupied with weddings, the white lacy fluffy taffeta living nightmares of the modern world. I was just dragged to this, and it is just as soul sucking as you would expect. A bizarre carnival of overpriced vendors swarmed towards me like hungry zombies as a third-rate band played Nelly covers and hesitant aspiring models in wedding gowns toddled down the runway in clear plastic shoes.

I need to sleep it off, but weddings have been haunting me even in my dreams. 4 weeks until I get my life back.

Warning: “Heroes" spoilers – and potential appetite spoilers – follow. You’ve been warned.

Some interesting food for thought on today’s Heroes. In a tragic twist, it turns out that the reason the perversely attractive Sylar kills people and eats their brains on a daily basis is because his mother makes him TUNA SANDWICHES when he expressly said he DIDN’T WANT ONE. That bitch. Also, he, like, totally wants to just be a normal watchmaker, but she, like, totally disses his “hobby” and wants him to be an iBanker/president, so, obviously, she totally deserves to get scissors through the heart.

Although slightly exaggerated, the show hides a gooey nugget of truth inside. Like Sylar, I have also lived my life under the creepy looming shadow of impossible parental expectation. Fortunately, rather than turning to the only possible solution (eating brains), I have been trying to “get the fuck over it,” in the immortal words of Dan Savage. Trying, of course, being the operative word. Watching Sylar's experience does make me wonder if we ever grow out of it, or if I'm also doomed to a lifetime of eating brain.

My own brain, of course. Eating it with the unforgiving spoon of self-doubt. It's a metaphor.