i'm thinking about how i should have done more drugs. i should have done more drugs and had more sex and maybe even gotten arrested. i should have done something to justify doing nothing now. At least balance my overwhelming nothing with the memory of something. My cubicle is one giant post-it note, one giant monochrome string tied to my finger, reminding me that i wasted my youth. i wasted it because i spent it getting here.
And now what am i going to do? Hollywood makes jokes about this kind of life. Movies and tv shows mock the hyperbole of the catatonic drone at the copy machine. "Isn't that hilarious?" We can tell our colleagues at the water cooler about how funny the episode about the sheet cake for Human Resources Appreciation day was. "It was hilarious because it was just like real life." i can tell you right now. The sheet cake is never funny. The only thing more depressing are the ladies in HR unable to enjoy their one day of appreciation because they're watching their figures.
All of this makes me want drugs. Not now, exactly. My acupuncturist just got my chi aligned and i have reading to do for my book club. Neither would tolerate well a helping of hallucinogens.
i want drugs five years ago. i want to go back in time and find my 21 year-old self. i would bully and peer pressure her into making some really terrible decisions. i'd whisper to my younger self, "You fear failure but cannot define success." My little baby eyes would get big, frightened yet comforted by this familiar stranger's sage advice. "Do the drugs..." My little baby head would nod slowly, sensing what divine providence was offering.
It's telling that my vision of my current self resembles some crazy-ass witch from a Disney movie.
By not developing my own definition for success, i have ended up with someone else's. i make enough money that i share a nice apartment in a nice neighborhood of a nice city. i take my nice girlfriend out for nice meals and buy myself nice cowboy boots when i feel like it. i drink two glasses of wine nearly every night, no more but seldom less, and fall asleep on the train home from work every day. i have a business card and two suits that i sometimes have to wear to fancy meetings. It is all very nice. i have achieved an admirable level of mediocrity. i played it safe and that is exactly where it got me. i took virtually zero risk and consequently have neither the failure nor the accomplishment to show for it.
i want to look deeply into those glistening little baby eyes and say, "Do something stupid because being smart will actually kill you in the long run."
And now, here i am, sitting in a cubicle. i'm wandering the halls of my mind, hunched over, warty, and wearing some sort of hooded cape regretting my relatively puritan life choices. Here i am. Full of advice, now wasted on my former self, and nobody to give it to.
So. Send me your questions, your cleverly coded acronyms, your problems, and your sorrows. In return, i will make up the best non-legally binding advice i can come up with. Will i have anything worthwhile to say? Will i unfurl for you the answers to life's questions you've been toiling with, dosing young minds with profound candor? Absolutely not.
i mean, i'll try. But that isn't the point.
The point is think about something other than this cubicle.
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