odd pear

I spend a lot of time looking for answers that should be easy to find. I recall a certain summer in upstate New York. During my last two weeks, you could find me curled into a fetal position on my roommate’s bedroom floor, agonizing. My sublease was nearly up, and I needed to decide if I would stay, find a real job and an apartment of my own, or go back to California.

One might imagine a decision like this would require some thought, some weighing of pros and cons. Maybe I did do that, I don’t remember. What I do know is that I spent many hours chest-beating, hair-pulling -- just shy of full-blown pouting, though I think writhing, and perhaps also a bit of foot-kicking, was involved somehow. It was a big damn deal. I was choosing my LIFE. In the big-picture, this-choice-affects-me-forever kind of way.

Except I didn’t really choose. I simply drifted back to Sacramento, because I knew exactly how it would go. At first, it worked out well for me. Then my imagined course fell apart a little and I was disappointed. But once I stopped wondering what might have been, I bounded ahead, saying yes to nearly every opportunity that presented itself. The small things and big things and in-between things that have happened in my universe since germinated organically from there. I have few regrets to speak of, but I haven't achieved any sort of clarity either.

So now I am here, torturing myself (and my current “roommate”) over one question: what do I want to be when I grow up? It’s one of those puzzles that is at once the easiest and hardest thing in the world to solve. I am looking very hard. Hair-pulling and chest-beating have commenced. I am not yet at the fetal-position phase, but I expect it soon.

Also, I can’t help but feel a little sheepish about all this ballyhooing. I suspect the answer I yearn for is right there. Like when you tear your apartment up in search of glasses that turn out to be perched on your nose the whole time. Once you realize, you become painfully self-conscious about the previous five minutes of cussing and bluster, and the deals you made with God to be neater if only you could just find your fucking glasses and get on with the day already. Whoopsie! Silly me!

I suspect the answer I’m looking for now is, likewise, right there: just at the tip of my nose. Which maybe makes it too close for me to really see.

Hopefully -- if I can find a way to stop squinting so much -- it will come into focus.