constant crises

as i sit here, i'm still waiting for the feeling to come back to my jaw. i went to the dentist today to fill up a tooth. apparently the sealant that was put in there years ago had worn off, so he needed to make the left side of my mouth feel disfigured. what's funny is that until a few minutes ago, my left ear was also incapacitated, leaving me with just one functioning side of my head. i had successfully rammed a piece of ear wax up into the inner canal while trying to clear it out with a q-tip. the lession: fuck q-tips. luckily my dentist had the answer for that situation too. he handed me a plastic squirting syringe and informed me that (in addition to being a fabulous toy worth several giggles) it could be used to inject water into my ear to flush out the ear wax. after about a half hour in the bathroom of firing warm water into my ear (during which time every guy that walked in must have been completely confused), i successfully dislodged the blockage and now instead of hearing "mrr mrrrrr mrrr mr mr" i'm hearing normal words. i immediately declared this a hallmark day (also a Hallmark day) in my head. really. it's just a fantastic resolution to a terrible personal crisis. i think that, as someone in my early-20's, i am prone to constantly declaring a state of personal crisis. it's not just me either. every week i seem to have somebody around my age tell me how he/she has JUST hit a quarter-life crisis (nevermind that he told me the same thing last week, which makes me wonder whether he has recently received some information that lengthens his life expectancy). the question is "why exactly are we, as an age range, having so many crises? as an aside, to be answered on your own time, what makes us think we will be living until 92 or 96? i think that it's not that we are having so many crises, it's just that the real world (read: post-school) is just inundated with constant crises. be honest, that's the reason half of your friends stayed in school longer: the avoidance of those crises. how do i get a job offer? what offer do i take? where do i live? who do i live with? what do i do on thursday night? how am i going to hang out with that girl again? it's a constant struggle. that's kind of sobering, if you think about it. YOUR life, from now until you die (or at least until you retire), will just be crisis after crisis. the big ones you'll label "quarter-life" or "mid-life" or "3/8-life". and that brings me back to the "quarter life crisis" of my age, which can aptly be labeled "i'm not loving my job and i feel like there should be MORE." we spend lots of time thinking about what we want to DO with our lives at this age, but that assumes a certain amount of "constant doing" after we figure it out. really, why would you want to "figure it out," because then you'll be doing the same thing for the next 30 years. the difficulty sometimes is explaining to somebody that you HAVEN'T figured it out or, more precisely, that the only thing you've figured out is one thing you DON'T want to be doing. yesterday i talked with a recruiter about a company that she works with. she mentioned to me that i might have a better chance of getting with a company around my subject experience: enterprise software. luckily, she also happens to work with several start-ups in that area. i jotted down a few notes from her and thanked her for her time. it was such a strange thing for her to propose, considering that i had explained to her that i don't really LIKE enterprise software. but i realized that she just assumed that i would want to directly build on this great experience i've gained. and therein lies the real question that we should all be asking ourselves at this "quarter-life crisis": do i have the balls to sack up and reverse field? call it the "good will hunting crisis." and you know what, this crisis is WAY better than the mid-life crisis, because a) i have no obligations except to myself, and b) i've got a lot of field ahead of me to run. it's not the quarter-life crisis. i'm calling it the "24/infinity life crisis."

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