it’s a simple question. so casually thrown in my direction with repetition and frequency:
so, what have you been up to?
apparently i’d like to answer that question with the confidence of someone reporting something that has already happened.
instead, i’m deciding what to study while reconsidering what i thought i was going to study. looking for freelance work after very publicly enjoying not working. wondering whether the thing i said no to makes considerably more sense under different terms. deciding what breakfast is going to look like for the foreseeable future and then, somehow, reopening negotiations with breakfast.
nothing is safe.
and each reconsideration makes sense while i’m in it.
that’s almost the annoying part.
i’m not waking up every morning spinning a wheel. i learn something. something costs more than i thought. something requires less of me than i thought. i try something and like it. i try something and don’t. a constraint disappears. a possibility shows up wearing much better terms than the last time i considered it.
so, naturally, i update.
which would be helpful if information weren’t losing useful life remarkably fast while every new piece is one more thing i need to know before i know.
one more listing. one more program. one more way to make money without rearranging my life around making it. one more logistical possibility that makes the thing i ruled out three days ago suddenly reasonable again.
and somewhere in all of that, what am i doing this week? becomes what am i doing with my life? what am i even doing…
as if a life should be less responsive to new information than breakfast.
i think i’m bothered less by changing my mind than by being witnessed somewhere in the middle of changing it. i’d much rather explain all of this later, when i know which things mattered and which were a weird three-day detour. when i can leave out the tabs that went nowhere and make the useful ones look almost inevitable.
hindsight gets to be selective like that.
it gets the whole set before it has to find the pattern.
i’m trying to find the pattern while the set is still being populated.
and maybe that’s why i keep wanting every current answer to sound so final. i’m asking the person living it to speak with the certainty of the person who already knows how it went.
i don’t.
i know what today gave me.
and today has enough of its own trouble without making it testify about tomorrow.
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