I’ve been preoccupied for the past few months wondering too many heavy things.

Okay, most of my life. Whatever. Potato, potahto.

At the dentist today, getting a tooth filled, I had to stop myself from asking how they know when they’ve got everything right, how this drill works, how the compounds set themselves. It’s a lifelong thing with me: wondering how things work. Wanting to understand the way things connect and correlate. I’m possessed of a desire to take everything apart, to poke around, and hopefully be able to put it back together. And this goes for everything from the VCR to life itself.

I’m fascinated, as some people know, by fractals and the Golden Ratio and the implications that the entire universe is built on numbers. I took psychology courses in college not so much to make a better profiler (thank god — that would have been a waste now, eh?), but to have a better understanding of what makes people tick.

Sadly, I also am possessed of the attention span of a 40-year-old computer programmer at the Playboy Mansion. I never had the ambition to take lots of science or math classes to more fully understand the things I’m curious about. In fact, my interests, while often cycling back to certain areas, tend to cover the range of the universe.

Maybe that’s actually a better thing for me, though — the more you learn about most subjects, the more you find yourself specializing. Were I a physicist, I’m sure that I would be balls-deep in quantum mechanics; a psychologist, exploring the connections between self-actualization and creativity. Instead, I wander to and fro, picking up crumbs here and there, and far more often than I should, I think, being able to make connections between this and that.

And I’m not sure, even after all this time, why I’m here (or that there’s even an answer to that — after all, any answer other than coincidence implies Intelligent Design and higher powers, and I’m not quite ready to accept those things as fact). I have no idea what I want out of life, what I want to be when I grow up, where I’m going.

But I’m getting closer. Maybe closer is the wrong word — it implies that there is an end to my quest, and I’m fairly sure there’s not. I’m feeling – what? Growth, definitely. Evolution. Progress. Like maybe I’m finally getting to the point where I’m almost done making stupid mistakes that create more little fires for me to have to put out, almost at the level where I can stop fixing my mistakes and start using and applying some of what I’ve learned throughout all my wanderings.

“The unexamined life is not worth living for man.” Plato? Socrates? Plato’s Socrates? No one knows. And maybe that’s the sort of stuff — trivial — that’s fun to pull out at parties, but ultimately unimportant.

Did Shakesspeare really write all those plays and poems? Does it matter? Those pieces are written and out there for us to enjoy. In the end, does it really matter, beyond an ultimately pointless sense of narcissism, who wrote them? There are no fees owed to the estates…. Of course, as someone partially consumed with the need to leave my mark on the world – possibly through an artistic creation – this is a funny thing to mention. Aware, that’d be me. But still, true — ultimately, unimportant.

Oh, and apparently, I’m an introvert. Never realized it…

It’s the every drug, Panexa. Who wouldn’t want a year’s prescription? Or more?

The worst thing about having as many great and wonderful friends as I do? Having to spend the first half of my birthday sleeping off one hell of a hangover, as birthdays start at midnight.

The best thing about today? I can now, officially and with authority, say that I’m older than Jesus.

Of course, at heart, I’m still not legally allowed into bars.

It’s all a matter of perspective.

There are places that each of us are meant to be. We may never find those places; worse, we may never recognize them for what they are, for the unique and special connection that we could have with them.

In the meantime, we’ll stumble and wander from place to place, perhaps lost, perhaps only restless and dissatisifed.

The only other option is to settle for less than what we really desire, to be content with what we are given, with what floats our way. There’s a level of sloth in that way, though.

While there are no guarantees that we will ever find what we are looking for, or that we will recognize it when we do, or that what we seek will even be obtainable once we find it — while all of this is true, does that really rationalize giving up and making do?

I don’t get too comfortable here, because it’s not where I’m supposed to be. Not in the end, at least. And I’m not anxious to leave, because there’s no point in jumping from one place to another without taking a look first, feeling around and checking to see if it’s where I want to be going.

Outside of that dream destination, it’s all just different names for the same place.

It smells like a doctor’s waiting room in here, and it doesn’t help that the carpet is made to inspire vertigo.

Outside, it’s gray and drizzling and cold. Perfect November weather. Exactly what I’ve been waiting for (sans the drizzle, I should say — rainy days and Mondays always bring me down).

We (being the entire IT department of UAB, excepting a few server admins) just shifted all of our offices from across campus into a new building, and the new carpet and furniture and paint gives it that newly disinfected smell. And the pod set-up, while inspiring for a sense of community, makes me feel like I should be on the phone trying to close sales.

The community thing isn’t even a point for me, since my department numbers one plus a part-time intern…

Interesting as time passes to watch the way the world is changing around us. New theories about workers and productivity and morale spring up, and you have a generational shift of new trends in the workplace. Christmas decorations spring up earlier and earlier every year, and the coll season starts later and later; the time change is just icing on the cake of temporal displacement. Trick or treating seems to be more and more a thing of the past; when I was a kid, not so terribly long ago, you went house to house, every house in the neighborhood, and loaded up. These days, you see fewer and fewer kids in costumes outside of school, and fewer and fewer houses with welcoming porch lights or decorations.

These are the things that old people notice. The changes, today versus the good old days. And I’m not old, unless you ask my baby sister or the twenty-somethings in my crowd; my 34th birthday is coming up this Friday, but I still feel (and act, and apparently look) 25.

But I can feel myself seeking those familiar patterns in life, from habitual behaviors to seasonal shifts. And I’m aware of how quickly they are changing, disappearing, moving on to become the memories of my baby sister and my niece.

It startled me a few days ago to realize that, with only 15 years between us, how many pieces of technology separate myself and my youngest sibling. And not just things like video game systems, or width of internet pipes. She’s never known the world without remote control, the internet, cell phones, portable music players, video players, or microwave ovens. She wouldn’t know what UHF is without a hint or two.

These are all things we all take for granted, whether we have them or not (I know plenty of people who do without cable TV, computers in the home, and cell phones — but they’re aware that they could grab them at any time if the need or desire arose).

And of course, the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots, the ever-marching progress of the capitalist world. The insane greed that drives millionaires to swindle blue-collar workers out of the life savings, that sends countries to war and creates insanely intricate webs of deception and lies and blind faith.

This world has lost it’s focus, I often think. I’m no different, no better, except maybe in the sense that I’m aware of it.

It, and the cloyingly clean smell that I have to put up with 40 hours a week.

I guess it could be worse, though. I could be stuck making calls, trying to close sales, instead of just feeling like I should be.

Been compiling soundtrack music to my iPod for my flight to North Carolina tomorrow.  There’s some truly excellent music that comes from scores out there, much of it transcending the film from which it came.  Hans Zimmer’s work on THE ROCK and TEARS OF THE SUN, James Horner’s A BEAUTIFUL MIND, and even the soundtrack to DIABLO II (yep, the videogame that ate a large chunk of my life a few years back).

One of the reasons that autumn is my favorite seasons, in spite of being ultimately so miserable for me, is that the weather is so open to allowing music to be transportive (totally made that word up, I think).  Summer and spring just don’t inspire me to make mix CDs of music — while I have plenty of music that fits the warmer air, the reemergence of the green, none of it ever really takes me anywhere.  It’s not as cinematic, I guess — or at least, not the kind of movie that I enjoy watching.

On top of the soundtracks, I pulled out Type O Negative’s OCTOBER RUST, one of the most aptly titled CDs ever.  It’s got a fair shar of memories attached to it’s songs — it came out in ’96, back when I was dating Maria, and while wistful, it brings back a lot of happy times for me.  But it also perfectly captures October: cold, getting colder, no green but a lot of color in the trees and in the sky, nostalgic and looking forward at the same time.

I’m not sure if it’s the mood swings, me piling on top of those with my music choices, or the cold weather (likely a combo of the three and then some), but my drinking goes up this time of year.  And the worst thing about that is that I don’t drink beer (never quite developed a taste for the aftertaste of it), and I’m trying to spend less money on it, which puts vodka out of the picture (damn you, Red Bull!).  The only alternative, however, are the malt liquor drinks like Barcardi O and such — yup, the girlie ones.  And while I’m secure enough in my sexuality to drink whatever I want (after a six-pack, I’m inured to the comments of the other bar rats, at any rate), it’s not conducive to meeting girls to be seen drinking things that are too effeminate for them.  Fortunately and unfortunately, I discovered that I have a taste for Woodchuck, a cider that comes delivered both in kegs and a sufficiently manly green bottle.

The unfortunate part is that something in it really sets off a reflux-like condition that I suffer through daily.  After my second, I’m usually not feeling too well; after my sixth, it’s time to vomit. And that’s not an issue of being drunk; I’ve built up way too much of a tolerance for that over the years, sadly for my wallet. The drunk vomit, in my experience, is not unpleasant, if only because you’re relaxed and fully aware of the fact that you’ll feel much better once you’ve purged the poison from your system. No, this is more violent, the body’s way of saying that this shit needs to be gone, and now. It usually hits me after I’ve been asleep for an hour or three, and its a sudden, no-holds-barred, and very unfun way to be awakened.

This started about two years ago, incidentally, and only seems to happen during the fall and spring months.  And I’m only aware of it because it seemed, when it first happened, related to the onset of my CIPD symptoms.  Happily, I’ve not experienced those in nearly two years — but everytime I have another Woodchuck nightmare, I become very over-conscious of the amount of feeling in my fingertips and toes.  All day long, I’ve been tapping my fingers against things unconsciously, just to make sure they’re not going numb.

If nothing else, the coughing jags from twenty years of smoking remind me that I’m still alive — and frankly, they’re not so bad after a fifteen minute early morning purge. so violent that I pull a muscle in my back.

It’s not the fall that kills you; it’s the sudden and abrupt cessation thereof.

Hurricanes’ Aftermath – MSNBC.com: “Police watched over the few gas stations that were open as a precaution in case motorists� tempers flared while they waited for up to five hours to buy fuel.

�This is like the Third World,� said Claudia Shaw, who spent several hours in a gas line. �We live in a state where we suffer from these storms every year. Where is the planning?�”

Um, yeah, Claudia. Where’s the planning?

And why is it that we expect everyone else to do all the planning for us?

Or better yet, move to an area that doesn’t suffer from hurricanes every year. At least if the storm is a surprise, you don’t look like a moron or a lazy ass when you say things like this.

Hello, my old friend.

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