Light the Tree

My mom is earning a master’s degree in a graduate art program in Manhattan, and tonight there’s a reception for all the students. My brother and I are going with her tonight (my dad can’t go). It should be very nice: it’s going to be at the Rainbow Room, on the top floor of 30 Rockefeller Center. Great views of the city. (Though I guess there’s no longer a view like this one.)

And, um, the Christmas tree lighting is tonight.

Yeah, right there in Rockefeller Center.

Um, I guess the area won’t be too crowded.

If there should be some sort of terrorist attack, well, it was nice knowing you. Please remember me fondly.

In the meantime, here are some fast facts about the tree. Here’s a live shot of the tree. (Right now I just see a man sitting in front of it with his eyes closed.) And you can watch the ceremony live on NBC, you know. (In the U.S. and parts of Canada, anyway.)

So, it’s been a few days since I’ve written, eh?

I think I’ve needed a little bit of “me” time. It just kind of hit me: why am I writing about the details of my life? How could any of this be interesting to anyone but me? I mean, who the hell am I, Princess Diana? And I mean, I don’t even know you people! It’s all really bizarre when you think about it.

Sometimes it’s nice to remember that your life really does belong to you and you alone.

I’ve also felt a bit stifled because I know with certainty that my parents have seen this site. When I was home over Thanksgiving, I found the URL in the Internet Explorer history files for a day when I wasn’t at the house. Apparently, one (or both) of them visited my site on Sunday night, November 4. The day before, they’d come to visit my new apartment and they’d taken me food shopping and out to dinner. I guess they wanted to know my take on the weekend.

I can think of two ways they could have found this site. One, I might have left traces of my own visits on their computer on the few occasions that I’ve blogged from their house. Two, one of them typed my name into Google and, with some detective work, they found the site. My parents are smart people. And I’d told them I had a journal on the Web.

Three, they know someone who happened to stumble across this site, and that person told them.

It was that stupid Associated Press article that did it. If not for that article, there would be no way of knowing I have a blog. Allowing the writer to mention my blog in that article was a big mistake, then. Gee, I sure didn’t get the mileage out of that piece that I’d expected: no increased readership, no interviews from Newsweek, no nothing. I did manage to reunite with an old college friend. Other than that, no good came out of that piece.

Anyway, from November 4 through November 23, there were no traces of parental visits to my site. Not from their home computer, anyway. I guess they decided that some things weren’t meant for them to read. Hehe. Yeah, they’re only for the rest of the world to read.

Or for about 180 people to read, apparently.

Well, mom and dad, if you happen to come back to my site: welcome. You might come across things that I didn’t want you to know about. I hope it doesn’t bother you too much. I am a human being, after all. At any rate, neither of you has treated me any differently in the last several weeks, so I guess either you chose not to read very much of my journal, or you did, and you read about things you now wish you hadn’t, but you were so damn proud of my writing that you just didn’t care — or you realize that I’m an adult now and that I have to make my own decisions.

At any rate, right now my relationship with the two of you is probably the best it’s ever been, so I guess it’s all good.

Back to my non-parental readers:

Watching Ric Burns’s documentary on New York City finally got me inspired to read a book I’d wanted to read for a while — The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, by Robert Caro. It’s supposed to be a masterpiece. So far, it’s pretty damn good.

I’m obsessed with age. Whenever I read a biography of someone famous, I compare myself to where that person was at my age, and I realize I’m woefully behind. Did you know that when Walter Lippmann was a college student at Yale, William James, the famous philosopher, was so impressed with something he wrote in the paper that he sought him out? Lippmann didn’t seek out James — James sought out him! And look at Leonard Bernstein: he stepped in to conduct the New York Philharmonic at the last minute and gained great fame for doing so — when he was 24!

You know, nobody’s ever sought me out. Nobody famous has ever recognized any particular talent in me and recruited me onto the path to greatness. My life hasn’t yet had that “aha” moment with which writers like to end Part One of people’s biographies.

Michael Chabon published his smashing first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, when he was 24. David Foster Wallace? Same thing, I think, with The Broom of the System: 24. Tina Fey graduated from UVA three years before me, and she’s already the head writer and news anchor for Saturday Night Live. Kirk Read, one of my UVA classmates and my one-time hallmate and confidant, has already written his first book.

Then again, when Harry Truman was 40 years old, he owned a hat store.

I kinda thought maybe this website could be a launchpad for something. So far, it hasn’t been. And my readership numbers have stagnated. No wonder — no contests here, no send-in-your-photos, no gimmicks. All I do is write. I don’t even write short, snappy entries; I write long, in-depth, sometimes rambling entries. If this were a book, I’d need a good editor. And I don’t even write about things that people care about. I write about myself, of all things. Are you kidding me? Who am I? Who cares?

This is one of the most solipsistic, inconsequential endeavors ever.

I want to do great things with my life.

Then again, I’m still young, so people tell me. But I’m constantly beholden to the illusion that my life is almost over, that all the good days are behind me, that the future does not exist — because I just can’t conceive of it. Jeez, there really can’t be that much time ahead, right? There can’t really be 50 or 60 more years of opportunity ahead of me, right? That would just be too good to be true.

And then I realize, wow, it really is true. What a blessing — truly a blessing. I have so much opportunity ahead.

And then I get impatient to get going with my life already. I want to do great things already. I think I have the talent. I have to work on the discipline and the focus and the drive, but I think I have the talent.

I just wish I knew what those great things were.