Chasing Windmills

So Much for Originality

I was goofing off doing google searches for old friends. In Hitch, the characters do this to get inside information on other people. When I typed my own name it generated 11.2 million hits. The first ten pages have nothing to do with me. I didn't go past that point.

When I googled my blog title, chasing windmills, I yielded 21,700 possibilities. The first 4-5 pages had nothing to do with me. Again, I didn't look further. The point is although we can try to be original and set ourselves apart, we aren't as significant as we think we are. With 5 billion people on this planet (or whatever that insane number is) and the fact that people have been around for thousands or millions of years (depending on your beliefs) we are hard pressed to be original.

Thoughts, feelings, and emotions while new to us as individuals are as old as dirt. We aren't really saying or doing anything that hasn't been done by countless others before us and that countless others around the world aren't experiencing at this moment. We aren't as unique as we would like to believe. Even in relationships...

whether it is breakfast in bed or standing outside someone's window with a boombox, to quote the Barenaked Ladies, "it's all been done before." Weddings, births, funerals, it is all just a continuous cycle. It just depends on whose turn it is. There is a certain complacency that sets in when you're the last in line. While you do have the knowledge that comes with watching everyone before you, there is no ooh and ahh factor when it is your turn. It becomes passe. It seems like everyone is just taking their places and going through the motions.

Blessed are those who are caught up in living life. I have spent my life as a perpetual observer like Scrooge peering through the window looking upon Christmas present. And now I feel as if life has passed me by. As I get older, things start to lose their wonder. I guess that is the irony of growing up. I feel like I am back in gym class. The teams have been picked and I am the odd man out sitting there watching the other kids play. This is ever so apparent by the fact that almost everyone of my friends is now married or engaged. Some are starting to have children. Even younger siblings and cousins are reaching these milestones. The phone rings less often. Visits are shorter and more sporadic. That is the nature of things especially when you leave your hometown, when you don't live in the same neighborhood as your high school buddies and meet at the Bennigan's on Thursday nights. When your kids don't grow up with your friend's kids.

I am currently faced with a unique situation. For the first time since, I can remember I do not have someone to fixate on (for lack of a better term). As long as I can remember there has been someone I have pined over. High school, college, law school, the real world. But lately, a few doors have closed through marriage, distance, or just drifting apart. At the present I have no one to write about, to send flowers to. I feel...lost. And no while I do not need to have someone in order to validate myself, I do hear Dean Martin's "Your nobody til somebody loves you" ringing in my head. I feel that I have such an immense capacity to love, and by love I mean cherish respect and appreciate, an it is being wasted. Imagine if Michael Jordan never picked up a basketball...that is how I feel.

Well, enough rambling for today.

posted by Michael @ 2:07 PM