finally(?)

You don't know it, but you've been deprived.

That's right, dear readers (assuming there are any of you left out there), I wrote two lengthy, lovely blog postings last week that got chewed up by the software and are gone forever into the ether. I felt like blaming the Vatican -- perhaps they were conspiring to make sure that my (relatively) laudatory blog entry about the late Pope would remain as the most recent posting on my blog forever! As time went by and I hadn't posted anything, I began to worry:

• Did I really like John Paul II all that much? Had I gone a bit over the top?
• Would people who happened upon the blog be immediately turned off and think I was a member of Opus Dei?
• Was there anything other than Catholicism I found it worthwhile to comment on?

It's kind of fitting, I guess, that my Pope posting remained up there for so long. It certainly mirrored the fixation of the rest of the media for the past week. You have to hand it to the Catholics; what other religion (especially one that is frequently being described as moribund) could command such attention for so many days straight? I mean, nothing was happening after the death had been announced. There was no news to the story of the Pope's funeral, except the documentation of the amazing outpouring of feeling.

Recently, my life has felt like CNN. I don't watch CNN or MSNBC or any other television network really. But I have a vague sense of how the news media coagulates around certain stories for days at a time (funerals, conventions, Terri Schiavo, the invasion of Iraq), offering viewers special graphics and theme songs, with an endless rotation of pundits wringing every last drop of significance from the event. The "news cycle."

The phenomenon seems similar to the way I sometimes experience my life: for a succession of days, everything seems like it ought to have special theme music with graphics that read something like "Busy Because It's the End of the Month" or "Feeling Like He Should Get Back Into Dating Again."

What's the theme these days? It might well be "Birthday 2005: The Countdown." It's coming up in less than two weeks and its impendingness has prompted a lot of different feelings. It seems like it will be simultaneously super-important and relatively uneventful. Last year (I recall with bemused nostalgia), I was very, very concerned that the party be a bug success. I pinned a lot of hopes on a particular young man attending and coming home with me (the first happened, but not the latter).

This year, there may well be four or so past and potential sexual partners in attendance and yet the suspense of whom I might sleep with doesn't seem especially tense. Maybe it'll happen with one or the other of them, but none of that really matters. It doesn't matter like the bigger questions do. I can sense them distantly imposing themselves on the horizon: Where am I going to live next? How long am I going to stay in my job? These are the biggies. The birthday is a signpost that one passes without necessarily getting a better sense of your bearings (like most towns and cities in Connecticut on your way to Boston from New York).

I'm in a funny place these days. I'm balanced and contented about most of the major things -- work, art, sex. Not that everything's perfect, but I guess I've stopped expecting that. I'll settle for "good with the prospect of getting better." I don't feel like I get things done, though. I get all the important things done eventually, things for work, for the shows I'm working on and for the classes I'm teaching. I have time to see my friends and meet up with them. It's the mundane things that seem impossible to accomplish -- like a haircut, or a teeth cleaning or even reading all the sections of the paper read that I would like to read. I never get a chance to shop for groceries. Maybe I've filled up my life with so many satisfying projects and vocational activities that I've no time left for the basic human functions. I have been eating less. At first it was just that I didn't have time to cook, but now I have much less appetite.

Hmmm. It's hard to know when this cycle will be over. When will the graphics and the theme music announce "Operation: Time to Smell the Roses" or even "Get All That Annoying Shit Done on Your To-Do List." Maybe not anytime soon.