Lightning bugs to die in jars

When I said "more substantial post coming soon!" I meant no later than three months later. I swear. All zero of you who read this blog will be comforted to know that the subject, content, and very point of this post has been written and rewritten ad infinitum in my head during the last 90 days as my life here unfurled itself in its various directions - the non-starters, the exhausting and frustrating, the beautiful and rejuvenating, and everything that falls inside of that triangulation. I wasn't writing in the blog for an obvious reason - I have been too incredibly busy to - and while it seems crazy to be too busy to write a quick blog post, I do actually take a long time to write blog posts, so it was this mental barrier. And most of the time when I have a little free time, I'd rather spend it playing guitar or watching some TV (japanese or other), out at drinks or dinner with friends, or actually talking to people I care about on the phone or internet. But I am truthfully pretty disappointed to not have sat down a couple of times in the last couple of months to write some thoughts and record some memories. My memory has become frighteningly unreliable, spotty, and quickly erased as I age and become increasingly exausted by work and over-exertion (if there is anything I have been criminal about here, it is sleeping the right number of hours; it's just one constantly building web of sleep deprivation). I know it sounds ridiculous, but it makes sense to me - I'm almost 27 and the number of signs of being old are increasing rapidly. To be fair, I know I am still young - it's just the increase is becoming more consciously noticeable.

And so much has happened in the last few months! A roller coaster of emotion and uncertainty and fear and redemption and minor confusion during most of my waking hours on weekdays, and an effing carnival of drunken retardation, empty-socializing, money-wasting, and seven or eight countries worth of extremely over-due (and only occasionally mind-numbing) European travel. I've visited almost every country on the mediterranean now and really need to turn my attentions north, where I've only been to Germany and Sweden. I think I'll write some huge post later reviewing all of my travels (ie, no I won't do that), so for now, I'll just leave it to that commentary.

One other thing of importance (this is going to be a short post as I need to go to sleep ASAP) as it relates to aging is the feeling that I'm running out my youth. And that sounds like such an obvious observation that I should be punched in the face for saying such a stupid truism, but I don't mean youth as in being quick-minded and physically spry. I mean having so much of your life still open to chance and wonder and dreams. Our lives are largely path-dependent vehicles, and as you make it down the path, the number of probable branches you can travel down diminish as a matter of course, at least in my mind. When you're 16, the possibilities are endless. When you're 27, the possibilities start to have some ends. I know - so much of my life has yet to be written so it seems funny to complain about it, but it's just that I feel the doors sort of closing and that in the next five years, I need to accomplish a lot of my dreams and goals or risk not ever achieving them. This feeling is caused by a lot of things - getting deeper into my career, careening towards higher and higher numbers and new decades in age, seeing friends and family everywhere getting married, the inevitable increasing responsibility I feel toward planning for a future - but it universally has made me feel both a little sad and a little anxious recently. It has made me question so much about the decisions I have made over the last 10 years of my life and whether they were right. It's a question I've asked myself constantly during that decade and one that has no answer whatsoever since it's impossible to, you know, actually know which decision would have been superior. But I do know I want to make sure the next 5-7 years are incredibly productive and fulfilling because I'm afraid of what will happen if they aren't.

Hopefully I'm either wrong about the timing or right to feel anxious.