today started with a friend needling me about not blogging (...how the time slips by between the posts, even when you're not thinking about it - though i did begin and abandon an entry in the interim, good bad not great [that's a shangri-las reference by way of the black lips, as i just found out], about how first i had been feeling mopey and then i got physically sick but was feeling better mentally and emotionally - well all this would go better if i could train myself into a more deliberately haphazard, anecdotal approach.)

she went on to 'braindump' about not knowing what to do with her life, feeling "crossroadsy and unsure." and she's the one who just got married and has a blossoming artistic undertaking and - if not a career per se, at least an agreeable day job in a sympathetic industry, which sounds more like a career to me than anything i've managed to stumble into yet. ("how much are you supposed to like your job?" she wondered - an excellent question.)

which is certainly not to suggest that she has any less right to bemoan or be apprehensive about her life situation than i do. from her perspective, sitting on the other side of the fence, i'm not so much unemployed as focusing on passions outside of the 9-to-5 grind. well fair enough - maybe so, even if i wouldn't tend to see it that way. how much are you supposed to like your passions?

another friend of mine just got broken up with in a particularly unfair and frustrating way. another one called yesterday, nearly in tears, having realized she needed to switch schools and coasts to escape from the despondency, borne of friendlessness and lack of community, that has been plaguing her now for weeks and months, maybe years. "ross, we're having quarter-life crises!" she burst out.

i'm not complaining...least not right now i'm not. you can call these things crises - some of them may be - but it seems to me life is just tough, there's a lot to sort out, and it doesn't quite dawn on us until after college when we're out in the thick of it. i've been living with low-to-mid-grade existential doubts and worries about what i'm doing with my life for long enough now that they've long since lost their urgency, which is to say much of their potency, which is not to pretend that they don't still knock me flat on my worse days. but, you know, here's my life - twenty-five years of it just about finished and accounted for - and i'm doing with it whatever i'm doing; trying to look to the future and suss out some sense, but trying just as hard to look to the present and recognize its relevance, to demand that my day-to-day existence assume a meaning and a fullness, prosaic or poetic as it might be, not to feel like there's something i'm still waiting for, to begin.

something like that - that's about what i told my friend. it goes okay. does make it a bit hard when the days don't live up to the visions i have for them as the days of a reasonable, responsible, real person - but it means i have to accept that those days are my life too, maybe a little too often these days (but only a little), and that alone has to make them a little worthwhile. right? not trying to justify the unjust, just trying not to disgust the disjust.

there's a lot i don't know - i do know exactly where i stand in terms of romantic/partnering relationships at the moment, which is nowhere. which is ok. i'm still trying to figure out where i'm going to live and when...things have flip-flopped at least once or twice since last post...but in the mean time i'm happy where i am, and getting happier. i'm starting to get a clearer sense of some things that are going on in the professional sphere - jobwise; perhaps careerwise in the sense that i can really only conceive of a career right now in similar terms to those described above. (i'll tell you about that later, once i know a little more.) i tend to think that i know what's going on on the friend scene, but sometimes i have thoughts about that too.

how does it really work out that i have all these friends spread out all over the place, most of them not especially involved in my quotidian life (my real life.) my friends in philadelphia are not well consolidated; most of them don't know each other, and they all have different schedules, which i try to keep in my head so as to develop plans around them, but it takes a long time and diligence to work it out, and for the most part i don't feel like i have much support or cooperation (like, more people who realize that i'm, presently, generally available, and more importantly game, more or less whenever - at least, more likely than not - and accordingly just call me up when they have ideas or availability.) is it that they don't remember me at those times, or do they just not have ideas or availability. i know, they don't have money or time or energy. life's tough. i do see friends and do things and fill up my social schedule, but i wish it could happen somehow less haphazardly and more fluidly, more deliberately, more in a context of community and coeval life-states, the outgrowth of a shared sense of inhabiting the same life in similar ways. crazy, i know. (again... there are a couple of folks who are not the people i'm talking about.)

what i'm really doing with my life, proper, when those things do work out, are the kinds of thing of little, self-contained, but still significant life-filling things i would be writing about here if it didn't tend to take me so long in between posts that i feel like i owe you guys (owe me?) a life status update each time, not that i have anything that especially new to report.

like this weekend there was a camping trip - a funny thing, the output of several weeks planning - close to a hundred e-mails worth of it (that i was involved with anyway), as well as chats and even some phone conversations - hard to say why it took so much exactly, though i'm sure i occasioned a chunk of it personally - through habit or necessity, not really intention, i suppose i ended up doing a lot of shepherding, which was sometimes stressful and also delectable. anyway it all came together in a pleasantly, deceptively haphazard fashion - and no question, it was all a lot of fun, unhurried and easy-going - it seemed to me curiously self-containing, that there was no more or less to it than exactly what it consisted of; each phase of the trip not so much experienced as enacted - travel, in multiple stages, each with its attendant joys and concerns; making camp; bailing on dinner - due to a thunderstorm that was well-timed but not quite well enough - and going out instead (to a china buffet); campfire; breakfast; hike; camping again [in a reduced configuration] with dinner in-camp this time; another fire; another little walk, and then the return travel.

not that these things weren't enjoyable - they absolutely were - but other than this broad, inevitable framework (much of which wasn't even discussed in advance, even with the amount of discussing that happened, it was just left to be determined, passively, by default), there's not much to say about what happened on the trip. sure, there are anecdotes that can be told (honey-mustard-pretzel taste-test on the drive up; a cappella tromboning; flummoxing the china buffet waitstaff by ordering not only á la carte but also veggie; gerrit and derrick's surprise delayed after-dark arrival and late-night grilling of hamburgs, sausages and shrimp; enthusiastic "manly" log-splitting which led to the arbitrary throwing of pieces of wood; impromptu variety show in a lean-to near "stony ledge") - and there was also some perfectly lovely scenery - but the substance of the trip was all in the group dynamics; the running jokes and banter and camaraderie and general silliness that was going on throughout.

and even that, in a way, was impersonal, if that makes any sense - so much of what was happening didn't bear much specific connection to the relationships i have with these various people - even though some of them are my very best friends - i'm definitely glad everyone in this group was there, but i feel like i could have had almost the same experience with a largely or wholly different (but similarly composed) group. i would find it strange to say that we "bonded" over the course of the weekend. thinking back, i'm not sure i really had more than one or two meaningful discussions with anybody the whole time, all on the last day when we shifted down to a five-person group (rather than ten), which of course brought an attendant change in dynamic.

i hope it doesn't sound like i'm complaining... really i'm not; the trip was absolutely a success for what it was, which was everything i would have wanted it to be. i'm trying to express something that i don't quite understand myself, and i'm not entirely sure whether other people experienced it this way at all. i'd be curious to know what you understand from what i've written. anyway.

[there was at least one absolutely memorable and special moment for me, which stands out as my favorite memory from the weekend - the singing that we did around the campfire on saturday night, which flowed from one song to the next without any discussion or even any pauses; just starting up, overlapping, sometimes several songs at once, harmonizing, adding air trombone obligato, switching before the previous one had necessarily finished, and creating collectively generated free-associative thematic and stylistic threads; i sang from "when the saints" and "swing low" to "black water" to "dixie" to "the night they drove old dixie down" to "zip a dee doo dah" to "hakuna matata" to "the bare necessities" to "the other day i met a bear" and onward - also memorable were "son of a preacher man" and "wipeout" and "smells like nirvana" and "one of us" and "99 problems"...we skipped simon & garfunkel and magnetic fields and indigo girls and gershwin and even the beatles until the following night, a more conventional folksing with mostly me and reb...even though it was late and past quiet hours; which i know created some unease too even though we were grooving too high to want to relent...anyway i'll remember that.]

better let it be now - i'm really gearing up to return to mincetapes. hopefully i'll be back here before saturday, but if not, wish me a happy quarter century?

how come i end up where i belong?