A Bad Fit

There are landmarks, events, milestones, passings that force you to take stock. Intense in the moment, they then become anchors in time and recollection that allow for comparison, for measuring things like change, growth, progress or escape. Collectively and individually, they give life context and texture, meaning really, the kind of thing we recognize as tragedy when they fade with the onset of dementia or when a sitcom character in the 1970s would lose their memory after getting hit on the head with a coconut. Both upsetting in their own ways, conceding of course that dementia is slightly darker for not likely being resolved within a 22-minute running time.

The weight of some moments are obvious as they happen: a marriage, a death, the birth of a child, the time a waiter forgot to charge you for the appetizers at a Chili's; these are what I call the Big Four. But as often as not, it's the small choices that feel either inevitable (obvious, so therefore not notable) or routine that can sometimes make their presences known only in retrospect as they gain density and gravity as the ramifications only reveal themselves cumulatively, over time. These inflection points are revealed rather than achieved. Harder to take credit for as they necessarily defy foresight, as seemingly harmless in the moment as the flap of a butterfly wing that one day results in the movie career of Ashton Kutcher.

Of course not all effects are that obviously damaging to society at large. For the most part, the impact is entirely internal, requiring contemplation, ideally leading to the right amount of reflection to either inspire positive change or provide some kind of relief. That's not always the case, of course, as memory can be torment, at the extreme end of fixating on one's failures or to a lesser extent just blithely whizzing past a series of potential inflection points like they were approaching rest stops along a highway when you didn't really have to pee.

What I'm saying is you can't make something out of something unless you have the awareness, the clarity and the tenacity to recognize the opportunity, even years later.

For example, I got not just one but two degrees in history. The thinking at the time (this was the mid-to-late 1990s) was as sophisticated as "well, I like olde timey stuff..." Not a single practical consideration. In fact, that's how most people end up in history graduate programs: you get yourself a history BA but you have too much self-respect to go to law school, so that's basically the last option left. No one goes into a humanities graduate program with anything as hard-formed as ambition in place. The only thing those courses teach you, ironically, is critical thinking, meaning all you can really do while you're there is become more and more adept at recognizing you're walking along a path with no real destination, just a steadily increasing incline, and at the end of which is a pit you have to dig yourself and whose only function is to burn money. And that, readers, is how some of us become stay-at-home dads for like eight years.

But sometimes, weirdly, your wife moves out and you have to get a job and somehow, in ways that would be too existentially terrifying to meaningfully analyze, you get a job that at least tangentially honors your history degrees, which you then parlay (17 years later) into an even better job that explicitly rewards it. I was going to say "pays it off," but that won't be literally true for another few years unless Biden finally comes through for me.

There was no way to know any of that decision-making, conjured out of a total failure of practical thinking, would ever amount to anything, and yet, somehow, here I am starting a new job I wouldn't have had without my totally stupid education.

I guess if there's a lesson, it's just that: persist, and you never know, you just might end up getting what you wanted. There are other examples. OJ Simpson got away with murdering his ex-wife and a friend of hers, but still found a way to do some measurable jail time for some other petty-ass shit about a decade and a half later. He could have let it go, but no, he just did what came naturally to him, stayed true to what he was, and got exactly what he deserved. Well, he got nine years of what he deserved, which is way less than it should have been. But you know what I mean. He was basically Ted Lasso before Ted Lasso, except American football instead of soccer and violent crime instead of Midwestern earnestness.