Month: March 2011

Monday various

Sunday adjustments

This afternoon, two friends and I went to see The Adjustment Bureau. It was kind of meh, decent if unremarkable, with some good chemistry between its leads but a little too much boredom and platitude in its action sequences. (Keith Phipps calls it “like The Matrix, as remade by the Hallmark Channel.”)

After the movie, the three of us went to a nearby bookstore for our weekly writing group, where I wrote something vaguely inspired by the movie:

There are three doors, none of them locked, even though strictly speaking at least two of them are supposed to be locked at all times. That, at least, is the tradition, and a tradition old enough that it has long taken on the appearance of formal law. There is no provision in the station’s written orders to suggest the origin of such a tradition, but all the same the station keepers have for centuries kept a log of the sequence and semi-random order in which they lock and unlock specific doors at the close of each and every night. Were such a log book to fall into your hands, you might at first appear perplexed, feel at sea in the face of such a knot of numbers and dates, stretching back through unlined pages for months or even years. But soon enough a pattern would emerge; you would learn an individual keeper’s idiosyncrasies, the specific ways in which she or he thinks about the doors, writes of their myriad destinations, and which specific destinations are most often kept under lock and key. Soon enough, you would learn how to anticipate these decisions, to recognize the patterns before they happen, and to know when the door you want — and you would not be at the station if you didn’t want a door — is unlocked. And then you could just slip inside and be gone, wherever it is that you wanted to be.

Faced with such limitless possibility, which door would you choose?

This is the fear that until now has kept two of the doors locked at all times: that if the doors are not locked, if some sequence or pattern or law is not unnaturally imposed — if only by the keeper’s whim — then all the station will be left with, in the end, is anarchy. Only by limiting the choices of its travelers can the station’s keepers impose some kind of order and balance. So says tradition, and tradition is one of the strongest forces in the world.

But tradition can be circumvented, short-circuited, and even burned to the ground if you know the way, if you have the means, and if the door you truly want is the one that leads straight to anarchy.

If they’d known what was good for them, they never would have hired me as the station keeper. Of all people. But I suppose they would have viewed it as some kind of fitting punishment for my original crimes. There, too, they were locked into the dictates of tradition. They would have viewed my appointment as an act of clemency, my tenure as keeper as rehabilitative, the very thing I most needed. I viewed it simply as the final seed of their destruction.

I suppose, in the end, all of us were fools.

There are three doors, leading anywhere and everywhere, and none of them are locked. Which door, then, would you choose?

Birthday

So I turned thirty-four today, which I think I wish I found more unbelievable than I actually do.

When I turned thirty, it just happened to be while I was at a conference for my job, and some co-workers asked me if I felt any different. “Well,” I remember saying, “I don’t feel twenty anymore.” And that’s pretty much how it goes: I don’t feel impossibly older than I did twenty-four hours, or even a year, ago, and god knows I don’t feel particularly grown up. But I also don’t feel particularly young. Maybe it’s the bad back, the recently banged-up knee, or maybe it’s just the natural way of these things. I feel like I’m in my thirties.

When I was in Boston earlier this month, I noted that, as I stood surrounded by crowds of twenty-somethings in Harvard Square, I had no desire to be among them. I felt no great nostalgia for my college days, I said, just the onset of a crotchety annoyance. That’s not entirely accurate. I’m occasionally nostalgic for my college days, just as I’m nostalgic sometimes for my childhood, teen years, or my early twenties. But that’s a far cry from wanting to hang out with these college students, or even wanting to relive those nostalgic years. Back and knee notwithstanding, I don’t really want to be in my twenties anymore. And lord knows, I’d be in no rush to relive adolescence.

I think that’s a healthy attitude, right? I mean, my life’s not perfect and not yet everything I wished it would be, but I’d rather be moving forward than looking backward.

Anyway, it was a really nice birthday, just a quiet Saturday at the old homestead. The weather was beautiful, although too cold to really do much of anything outside, but I spent the day happily watching some television and reading some Kaleidotrope slush. (Discovering that rarest of rare things: a story I want to accept.) Then this evening, I had a nice dinner out with my parents and some very lovely presents afterward — including the first two volumes of Absolute Sandman and a new leather jacket. (I managed to wear my previous one into the ground; I’ll have to be gentler with this one.) My sister called to wish me a happy birthday, and I’ll see her next week when she and her husband visit, and overall I had a really nice day.

Hopefully our dog, who as it happens shares my birthday, can say the same thing. Although I think he’d argue he got much less cake.