Thursday, August 14, 2014

A few things I'm doing...

Wanting: To have a regular schedule with a regular paycheck and regular regularity. I have a sneaking suspicion that I gently placed my regular brain into the cardboard box alongside my office detritus on the day I was let go. I have been feeling a steady stream of locationless ennui, peppered with the quasi-existential panic of not being able to pay rent in a month. I realize that there is a segment of the population that is okay with this type of non-schedule schedule. They are the types that generally freelance, own their own business and do assorted other awesome things. I am not of that ilk. My life has thus far unraveled accidentally and I always just assumed that whenever I ended up doing something, it was by mere chance. At the very least, when I think about my major life decisions, I made them without much torturous debate or real consideration of the consequences. I've been lucky (?) so far. But this lifelong pattern has just turned into me cooling my heels while waiting for something to accidentally happen or a choice to present itself rather than me going to actively look for it. What a maroon.

Watching: Pretty much nothing consistent. I realized that last year I painstakingly chronicled every film I watched. I can't offhand remember the number I landed on by year's end but if I'm going to compare last year's list with this year, I'm going to cringe at the dearth of film in my year. I have seen some great things this year but I miss the quantity. Isn't that the old adage about everything worthwhile? "It's not the quality but the quantity." No wait, I might be getting it confused with capitalism.

Excited about: Arcade Fire. In two weeks I'm spending the weekend with my favorite band by going to two (possibly three) of their live shows here in New York. The tickets for the first show were bought nine months ago in the middle of the night when Lauren texted me to say that American Express had put them on pre-sale. That half asleep euphoria of buying something I really want, in a way that felt (and likely was not even a little bit) exclusive, coupled with the wait of so many long, long, Win Butler-less days has reached a fever pitch. These shows will mark my sixth and seventh time seeing them live so it isn't as though this is a new experience. I am just a superfan. An old ass superfan.

Sorting through: Page after page after page of tiny scrap papers with dollar amounts written haphazardly. This is not an exaggeration. Over the last week or so, I have found so many different slips of paper embedded with my frantic handwriting as I try to figure out my current budget and project some sense of calm onto my future budget, a task that is becoming more and more difficult as the weeks melt away. Here's evidence:

I just found those in the back pocket of my purse.

What makes me laugh about this is that the numbers are totally useless approximately one minute after I write them down. My bank account is like a moving river...that flows downstream. Also, if this ephemera is what will comprise my estate after I've passed away, I think posterity might consider me a crazy person.

Dreaming of:  Traveling. It has become a frequent habit of mine to look up travel deals, price out tickets and Airbnb rentals despite my dwindling bank account. It is an exercise in both masochism and futility but it is also temporary. I keep checking for flights to Stockholm, Peru, and Iceland. I asked the Magic Eight Ball if my visiting any of these locations in the next year seemed likely. It said "Not Bloody Likely" and I swear I heard faint, yet mocking laughter somewhere in the distance.

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