bye

Everybody’s leav­ing, it seems. I might be too. I don’t want to, hon­estly. But there is a Big Impor­tant Job down in New York City that might save my life if I let it. Last week I spent five days ago­niz­ing over which vari­ant of Trade Gothic to use on my résumé; then I had a dream Thurs­day night about a fucked-up two-column for­mat that I was so sick­en­ingly proud of that I actu­ally applied with it.

I was watch­ing a speech recently in which the author of Stum­bling Upon Hap­pi­ness was describ­ing the phe­nom­e­non of pre­fer­ring the out­come of an irre­versible choice after the deci­sion more than before it — describ­ing this phe­nom­e­non as being intu­itive. Am I alone or don’t a lot of peo­ple work pre­cisely the oppo­site way? When I choose some­thing irre­versibly, it becomes worse in my eyes than its alter­na­tives. Maybe just a symp­tom of chronic pes­simism, or as I pre­fer to call it, hard-boiled realism.

Any­way, every minute that passes since I sent in that résumé is more excru­ci­at­ing and remorse­ful than the last. Sad to say if I get the job, it’ll be the first one that “counts,” the first one where I’m doing some­thing at least periph­er­ally related to some­thing I actu­ally like for the sake of lik­ing it, like–lik­ing it.

So I guess this is another diary-like post. I wish it were like 1999 and none of my friends were too proud to have a Live­Jour­nal. There are some strangers’ blogs I read who have lit­tle close-knit LJ com­mu­ni­ties like that, where they just talk about shit and post pic­tures and then com­ment on each other’s posts with inside jokes and stuff. That sounds cool. In the mean­time I feel bad for peo­ple who found this place Googling for Fire­fox tips or some­thing then sub­scribed to it think­ing it’s a tech blog. Sorry, this isn’t a tech blog. I don’t know what it is.

Sun­day marks two years since I first lis­tened to Ys. It’s not my favorite album or any­thing but it does rep­re­sent the begin­ning of fall for me, and I meant to wait until the anniver­sary date to start lis­ten­ing to it again, but my mem­ory failed me and I started yes­ter­day. The details of my life.

Then again I feel like that’s what kind of hap­pens when you get old. It’s trou­bling. In col­lege things are always in flux, there’s exams and sched­ules and projects and deci­sions and dead­lines. After that, if you have a steady job and live in the same place for a sig­nif­i­cant length of time, you’re just an adult con­sum­ing media. I’m nat­u­rally nos­tal­gic, but at the same time I don’t like the idea that I’m lis­ten­ing to the same album on pre­cisely the same street at pre­cisely the same time that I was 720 days ago. Or, rather, that I haven’t changed since then. Even my cre­ative out­lets are rou­tine and predictable.

I’ve been liv­ing in this city for almost three con­sec­u­tive years, I think the longest I’ve lived in any one place in my adult life. I’ve moved from Illi­nois to Mass­a­chu­setts to Ohio and back to Mass­a­chu­setts again. I feel like I need to squeeze in one more major change before I hit 30, which will hap­pen in just over two years.

I remem­ber read­ing a long time ago about Andy Warhol say­ing he likes being in a rut. It’s lit­tle consolation.