Weblogs (at least those with online diary content) are strange things. They force you to make decisions about which parts of your life are open to everyone and which parts of your life should remain discreetly behind closed doors. Even more so, they force you to decide (at some level) which parts of your life are entertaining enough to be open to everyone.
With a few exceptions (28th birthday, the Yell Awards, Mark and Vance in the UK, Groucho Club), I have hardly been writing about my life at all recently – and when I look back over my archive I can see that this trend started when I last saw Max. [cross referenced for your pleasure: 11 June, 17 June] For a long time after the last disaster, it was almost like excised my personal life completely. I just got on with business. As a direct result of being gutted, I felt I had no inside left to write about…
But over the last couple of weeks it has all been seeping back. The run-up to my birthday was very much one of those times when you look around you and think to yourself – “what have I achieved?”, “why do I bother?”. This is pretty much run of the mill stuff, except that this year I started thinking about questions like – “why am I alone?”. A few years ago I pretty much made peace with being single – it seemed to me that my life was going pretty well without the additional luxury of actually going out with people. After all, if you want fantasy, romance and love you can rent a trashy video. And there’s very little else that a relationship can provide that you can’t find somewhere else.
And yet in the background now, I feel the questions still lurking, unanswered. I don’t really know what’s caused their reappearance – I went to see High Fidelity last weekend, and that compounded the anxieties of my birthday. I had some unromantic, but highly enjoyable … fun. Then I watched Dawson’s Creek with Mella, and watched her invest huge amounts of energy in the burgeoning relationship of Pacey and Joey. We got incredibly drunk on vodka and talked. She put her finger on part of the problem almost immediately – she said that getting older would be fine if it came with all the trappings it is supposed to. The late twenty-something should have a reasonable job with career prospects, a relationship that has lasted a while and should be thinking about things like mortgages and making some kind of long-term committment. To be that age without those things – well it’s like some kind of cruel joke.
Anyway. I’ve decided to let you in on the joke, I think. I think that’s what this posts about – it’s about getting some personal content out there again – picking up my guts from off the floor and putting them onto the web. It may not be entertaining, but it’s as real as you can get. And maybe that’s more important.