Friday 15 June 2007

Welcome to NowWhat, population me

If I could have lunch with any person, living or dead: Douglas Adams. Brilliant writer, amazing sense of humour, and apparently, he was full of joy for life, for adventure, right to the end.

One of his creations in the HHGG series (I forget which book) was NowWhat, a planet discovered and populated by a group of people, who, after crossing the universe for years and years, finally reached it. Then, these brave and dedicated space pioneers looked around the damp, dismal and depressing new world and said, "Now what?"

I feel for them.

Let's see: Graduate university. Get sensible job. Get married. Check, check, check. So where am I left? (Kids can wait a few (19?) more years.)

In NowWhat.

I see several options. The one that makes the most sense (ish) is to work on my career, and hard. Get training, get advanced, make connections, take over. But then, another part of me thinks, why? If we do have children eventually, I'll have to leave work (and be a taxpayer burden - I mean, more than I am already) for a year. Longer, if there is more than one childer involved. And why work to make yourself indispensable if you'll need to disappear from the workplace, one year at a time? (And land, depressingly, on ThenWhat, the planet one goes to once all life steps are completed?)

Or perhaps I should "turn Martha." I figure that Chris would embrace this option, too, except that he would be the victim of the decorating, scrapbooking, gourmeting, and napkin-folding... and the many, many disasters that I'm sure would ensue.

Take my "last chance," maybe, with fitness competitions? Go back to my chicken-and-veggies-and-train-till-it-hurts lifestyle? This, to me, is somehow the most attractive of my options. With each option, though, I have a feeling of marking time, marching in place (treading water/writing metaphors, so to speak) until the next big life change (aka a Baby) comes along.

This is probably just the post-wedding blues: nothing big coming up; bills to pay; loss of identity (Karen who?); sense of stasis; search for meaning; a sudden loss of direction... ah yes.

I know where I am now.

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