The Post-Birthday Trough

Life is like wavelengths (can you tell I pretned to be a science person?). There are crests and there are troughs. And just after the Jesus birthday, I have found myself in a big ol' trough. A big ol' "can't get out of bed" "just sit on the couch and watch t.v. shows I hate" "why bother to shower" trough. Slump. Funk. What-have-you.

Why do we hit these? Why do we hit them after birthdays and such? You'd think we'd be happy to have survived this long, to have had another year on the planet, all of the good stuff. But...there's some part that's hung up on the mortality. We get stuck on being closer to death or something. Try to hang onto our energy, conserve our power for...the long run or something.

Well, it also might be the underemployment, the fact that the woman I've been kind of, sort of seeing is three thousand miles away and I'm not living in my own space. So that all my contribute to being in a big ol' trough.

But the good part about troughs is that they're usually followed with crests. So we shall see.

What Would Jesus Sing?

I'm a couple of days into my Jesus year here and it's been...uneventful, I must say. It's been a little weird being unemployed right now. I wonder if Jesus was ever unemployed. I don't think the Gospels are too clear on that point. Not that it was particularly important with all the miracles and such. And, if someone were writing the definitive tale of my life as an inspiration to others, I'm pretty sure they'd leave out the three days spent sitting on my ass watching the first season of 24 on DVD. Not my finest hour.

But I did get out and have a little birthday fun. I'm a fan of karaoke, particularly in bars. I've done the karaoke box, and that's cool, but there's something about throwing it out there in a crowd of strangers. So I tried to gather up my friends and hit some karaoke here in the city. I found a pretty promising spot: Bar 13, near Union Square. And it was pretty much what I'd want from a karaoke bar: dark, mostly empty, not too pricey.

But then, there was the question of what to sing. Over the summer, I had a gig in upstate New York and there was a local bar for karaoke night with something like 1,000, maybe 1,500 songs. Not too shabby, but not a lot of choices over the course of a summer. Bar 13 has 13,000. I was paralyzed. Too many choices...

Still, fun was had. Even though very few of my friends showed up. I'm working on not taking it personally. I don't think I'm doing very well, though. It's been a weird birthday. My mother forgot. My brother forgot. My sister forgot. My dad and my stepmom remembered but they're out of town.

Don't know what it all means...probably nothing. You ever think that Jesus' birthdays sucked. I mean, it sucks to have a birthday on Christmas.

My Jesus Year

The conventional wisdom has Jesus Christ of Nazareth being crucified by the age of 33. By that point, he'd been a carpenter, thrown the moneylenders out of the temple, walked on water, turned water into wine, made a few loaves and fishes feed a multitude and founded a religion that would eventually spread over the face of the earth.

Tomorrow, I turn 33. And I've...moved a few times, dated some women, drank more than my fair share and wrote some plays.

This isn't a comparison that comes out well on my end.

So this is it, my last chance to do something truly lasting with my life. To really make a mark. Okay, it's not my last chance. That's a little dramatic (what can I say? I'm a dramatist). But this is a good year for reflection, for looking at my life and works, and, of course, for getting my ya-yas out before the biographers start.

I think most people are aware of the whole Curse of 27. Janis, Jimi, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, all dead at 27. That's a birthday that's about proving you're more hardcore than them, that you can party like the Rock God you are, as a friend of mine used to say. But this birthday isn't like that. Even in days like this.

For anyone who might be feeling uncomfortable, I'm not a religious man. And I'm not an anti-religious man. This isn't going to be a whole thing about how Jesus saves or didn't exist. It's just looking at one pretty famous life and my own significantly less significant life and wondering how I stack up. I'm a guy and I'm all about measuring.

So these will be thoughts and discoveries and just...the detritus of an average life lived now.

Pretentious enough for you? I thought so.