timestamp.

... hard to concentrate ... you read me like a book (I read with my hands) ... toma ... likealittle ... naked hula-hooping, the first and the last time ... snowflake extravaganza ... the time Alice spilled a cup of coffee on Brigid in government class and the poor girl had to wear a collection of everyone's gym clothes for the rest of the day ... doomtree blowout v, the two-door and the astrovan ... land shark, smirnoff ice, capital brewery, fosters ...


Yesterday I spent my evening ticking things off my list, and it was great.  But after hours of sending text messages about minor details that sparked profound memories, listening to songs that made me feel something from another time; after a conversation about staying in and getting out of relationships; after responding to the "too much reminiscing" comments with a semi-self-deprecating and melodramatic "I don't really know how to make new memories..."  Well, after all that, the thought struck me that, maybe, I live in the past.

With the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future hovering so close this time of year, this thought is not entirely a surprising one.  And as it turns out, today, all astrological signs point to an unusual fixation with these abstract divisions of time.  Especially Saggitarius--check me out: Some people are disturbed by thoughts of the future. Not you. You know it will be better than the present because you keep getting more and more savvy about how to make it so.

Sidenote: Certain person(s) like to remind me that I'm more Scorpio than I think, since I am, after all, a cusp baby, and there is no doubt some truth to this statement.  However, I have long committed myself to Saggitarius status--a la Harry Potter and the Sorting Hat.


...Please, Scorps, focus on the concept behind that analogy and not the fact that, by default, I just compared Scorpio to Slytherin.  That's not what I'm trying to say at all.


My point, to tie it back, is that my commitment to my zodiac sign is yet another lingering legacy of the Past.  So, moving on...


My dad told me once that I live so fully in the present moment that it's hard for some people to follow.  I must have been 12 or 13.  That character judgment, at least at the time, I think, reflected my ideals more than my reality.  And it perhaps became a self-fulfilling prophecy.  In any case, the comment stuck with me, and I have spent years appreciating, sometimes painfully, my current situations.  I have worried whether living in the present makes me a hedonist, and whether it would be such a bad thing if I was, if it meant I could be fully in the moment all the time.  (Beneath this mostly ridiculous worry lies my ancestral moral foundation. But I have a post in the works on that topic, so I won't go into that right now.)

Yet, despite my most poetic "be here now" idealism, here I am, a Dweller.  My ghosts are swarming, Christmases Past clamouring for their place in front of the ghosts of non-Christmases Past.  It's a little hard to see them clearly through the whiteout of 22 snows, give or take; but there are special gifts and romantic moments and a few faces I couldn't see again in person no matter how many frequent flier miles I had.  A lot of tears and disappointments and a lot of Beautiful Moments too.

Christmas Present is pretty straightforward: It's wrapped up under the tree and every day leading up to Christmas, when you think nobody's looking, you shake it to try to guess what it is, and just hope it's not particularly fragile.

OK, OK, enough (lame) jokes.  My Ghost of Christmas Present is pretty sparkly overall despite the fact that many of the loves of my life are scattered far and wide (and I dream about them) and I would accumulate a space-travel-worthy number of frequent flier miles if I did manage to visit them all.  Ask me how things are going and what I've been up to lately and my mind goes blank.  I shrug and reply, "Good" and "Nothing...  Not much at all, and nothing of substance."

I was talking to my friend Steve recently and I mentioned that I've never really been able to envision my future in any of my past relationships.  I know some people who had to reconstruct their entire life in goals and visions after breaking up with a significant other.  Maybe my relationships just haven't been very long in the overall scheme of things, or maybe I've erased those visions as a coping mechanism.  I sometimes suspect, though, that one scar I bear is future-blindness.  I don't trust the future enough to depend on it.  And so I struggle to make plans.

Now, I say I'm scarred and you think the worst.  But I'm still young, and I've never undergone any major surgeries, or any minor surgeries for that matter.  Scars signify to me that something happened and you survived, and you're more interesting because of it.  If you think I'm naive for this belief, rejoice that I have not been irreparably paralyzed by hurt and try to remember what that feels like.  It's liberating.

So, my future is undependable.  My present is too dependable.  By default the past is all that's left.  We suit each other perfectly.  It's always there when I need it, but it doesn't hang around or get clingy.  It doesn't love me too much and in fact it knows just where to hit me so it realllly hurts.  On the flip side, it also knows all the best spots to kiss me and make it better.  Perhaps most appealing is that it changes to fit my needs and my current situation...

And here we get rolled up in the conundrum of past, present, and future: None of them actually exist, except in the present.  That's awesome.  Hedonist or not, I can't escape the timestamp on my perceptions.  (Case in point: I wrote most of this post on scrap paper at the restaurant earlier this evening, and by the time I got it out and got home and got to my computer it seemed irrelevant already.  Ha.)

I guess it still is relevant because I'm twenty-something and I have my whole life ahead of me and part of what is so difficult and daunting about this is that I need to know my trajectory if I'm going to be able to follow it.  Or at least that's what they're telling me.  Apparently what makes life worth living is still to come, you know, eventually having a nice house and a nice car and a nice husband and nice kids.  We could easily get religious here and say Heaven is what makes it all worthwhile, or Nirvana or whatever.  It's starting to feel more normal to think about "forever" now, to think about myself or my friends spending "forever" with some other specific person, to predict my career path as something that starts here and now and continues on indefinitely, to feel exhausted by life-extending medicine and the thought of life without death.  But can't we do things now for the sake of doing them now?  That doesn't make us aimless hedonists, does it?

I'd better stop before I get in an argument with myself over moral psychology.  This has been pretty rambling and academic and self-absorbed, but please weigh in if you have thoughts or experiences with this.  I have a hunch I'm not completely out in right field here.