emily, this is your life...

do you ever go through periods in which you don't feel like yourself? periods when you feel like your very existence is a burden? when nothing feels natural, everything requires effort? this is not my beautiful house/this is not my beautiful wife, et cetera...

no no no, this is not some cry for help. i'm just in a really weird head space lately.

i have this job right now doing contract work. document review. it's mindless, repetitive, tedious, but the money is okay. yet i literally sit in a little cubicle all day long counting the minutes until i can go home. or calculating how much overtime i'd actually have to work to justify buying an iphone. or daydreaming about snowboarding or knitting or -- jesus fuck -- or about LIVING. living! i don't feel like i'm living, and i feel this awful pressure to DO something with my life!

see, i think i'm having a crisis of faith. or a crisis of nonfaith. and i can pinpoint when it began -- the evening of friday, december 7th, over dinner at a stupid chain restaurant down at the waterfront. that was when my father and i had this truly terrible, erm, conversation (for lack of a better term), during which i basically admitted to him that i don't believe in god and i'm tired of being told to pray about everything all the time. and i might have also compared the holy spirit to a "magical little fairy". yeah. good quality family time, that.

here's an embarrassing admission: i think about death a lot. a whole lot. i've basically been obsessed with death since the fall of 1995. that was when my mom died. i think about my own death as if it could happen any moment. some people find that liberating and carpe-diem-poetic and all that. i, however, find it -- i dunno -- somewhat terrifying. but not because i'm afraid of what happens afterwards, because when i'm dead i'll be dead -- it won't matter a bit. but because i feel like the craptastic holding pattern that has been my life to date will have been a real waste of this one shot i got at living. because i don't buy the theory that there's an afterlife that offers some sort of glory or grace -- i'm of the belief that if you want to be happy, you'd better the hell make yourself happy NOW.

okay, lemme try to reign this in a bit. i feel static. this seems like one of those life phases where i'm supposed to take some important next step, but that thought makes me furious. i don't want to just do what i'm supposed to do, because that's what everybody else does. i don't want to be another person in a responsible job with a retirement savings plan and three weeks of vacation time per year. i don't want to push out a couple of kids who resemble some second chance to get right all the things i got wrong back when it was my turn. it's still my turn, damn it! and this whole working-for-the-weekend shit is not only fucking depressing as hell, but it's wasting my time.

perhaps this just a new manifestation of my anxiety, or perhaps this truly is some sort of post-adolescent existential crisis, but these days, everything feels like a neurological event -- a pre-seizure, a brain shiver, numbness of limbs, a short in the circuits. granted, the major neurological event of a few years ago is still a ghost that haunts me, so my objectivity is suspect, but every single moment feels...

...biological.

one of the reasons that i left the whole faith/religion/god thing behind is because of those damn seizures. you shut down completely, then you restart slowly until everything is back online. like a computer. like a machine. you begin to think about your body as mechanical, your consciousness as the delightful consequence of a series of cooperating and functioning systems. but you also realize that if something goes wrong and stays wrong, eventually it takes the rest of you with it. and the balance seems so delicate, almost accidental. and, well, what the fuck?

so, there you go. my weird head space. i just want to feel like what i'm doing with my time has some value. because time is a precious commodity.

sheesh. i need to lighten up.