The Old Me

Well, it's been over a week since I was brutally upended and relocated by the buffeting winds of indifferent fate. I'm kind of like Matt Damon in that movie from the summer, but instead of having my friends turned into pigs or suffering long-term sex-slave captivity by Charlize Theron, I find myself in a walkable urban gay neighborhood with a plethora of vegan restaurants. The one real similarity is that I also always have a beach in view. I guess the main and most definitional difference is that unlike Odysseus, the place I've been dislocated to is actually home.

I'm embracing the newness of experience, specifically with the accidental circumstance of being cool. Now, to be clear, I'm not saying I myself am somehow now notably cool, but given my funky environs, if I described the place I live absent the polluting subjectivity of my extreme middle-aged-dad-ness, an unbiased observer might mistakenly reach the conclusion that a cool person lives here. And given the pool of other residents in this apartment building--younger, childless, pastel-color-dyed hair, unmanicured eyebrows--I am, by the law of averages, a cool guy. We're not going to examine all that closely what part of that data set might be bringing up the rear of this demographic coolness spread. This is math, we're just interested in results.

The downside of this density and closeness is that there's a lot of people going the same directions at the same times of day most days, including me traveling to my new job. At first I was horrified when using my Google Maps to game out my commute scenarios, but after a week of trying to make it work, it turns out that a solid red commute route every day means the traffic, if nothing else, is predictable. Consistently horrific very notably contains consistent.

Right now the days are still long and disorienting. I'm surprised I've found time to write this at all. I'm working through being The New Guy at work for the first time really since 2007, which really is the most displaced-feeling part of the experience, more than the move, more than the lifestyle shift. Sure, in time I'll be my normal self, dominating the workplace with my terrifying competence and humility, but for now I have to remember how to be the closed-mouth information dumpster, a slow-blinking mute being taught to talk again after a traumatic brain injury, mostly in acronyms. I'll know it's time to find my voice again when I can form a coherent sentence made of just strings of capital letters mixed in with the business-jargon verb.

For now, we're going to FM the DMJ until we can cohere the BBVL into a SDE that squares with the OOLA. I'm not sure if it's exactly dactylic hexameter, but I don't really know what that is, so maybe!