There's a time for the socialite in all of us...

What is it about standing around at a party that can make me feel utterly self conscious and so entirely at ease at the same time?

A company that we do business with had an "office warming" party today. It was a cute little gathering. They're a fairly small company, but they have relations with some rather large companies. It was more than I expected actually... There was a well stocked bar, a good cheese/bread/crackers/dip table, and a few servers walking around with fresh hors d'oeuvres.

The thing that gets me is that I start off worried about everything. Did we show up at a bad time (too early/too late/in the middle of something)? Am I under/overdressed? What is appropriate to talk about with people? Then I start getting comfortable. I start making every day happenings into great stories to tell people. Something as small as a remark someone made to me at a meeting yesterday turns into something interesting to talk to other people about. I start feeling like we should get to know people that we'll probably never see again. And then I start wondering what it's all for... Is this really doing me any good? If I don't really know these people, and I'm never going to have any relationship with them, why should I try to have a conversation with them. And the question I ask myself most honestly is, am I doing all of this just so that I won't be standing over there by myself? The answer is undoubtedly yes.

Even if I end up having fun, I still wonder what it's all for. Especially when I walk away from it with the taste of alcohol in my mouth. I don't like it as much as I used to, and I always hate the aftertaste. But isn't that how so many things in life are -- no matter how much you don't want to do something, you're drawn to it time and time again, always knowing that you'll hate the aftertaste.

Chance

Sometimes it makes me dizzy to think about my past. There are so many things that could have gone differently. It's like I'm running to the end of a path that almost existed. It's depressing to think that we only have one life.

I wish every possibility were not only possible, but true. I wish that you could somehow know yourself on those other paths. I wish that you could wake up as yourself, but in some other reality... that you could know for yourself what you should do, because you could know what would be if you did it differently. It's such a waste to live only once.

What if we could live every possibility?

Maybe we do live every possibility. For all we know, all of our lives are running like back-to-back episodes of Seinfeld... at the end of this life, you'll play it over and change that one little thing that ends up changing everything. Only we'll never know, because we're starting over every time. It's like a million monkeys banging on typewriters trying to get Shakespeare, only we're the monkeys, and we're just trying to get everything we can out of our existance.

a different morning

I know I'm getting older all the time, but I just feel really young. There are a lot of people who would say "yeah, right... you're 23, you are really young." But I mean really young... A lot of times I feel like I'm still 16 or 17. Maybe 17. I don't have that "Yes! This is the first time I'm allowed to drive by myself!" feeling anymore. I know that I do things that people who are older than that do. I got married. I have a career. People are always asking me when I'm going to have a baby. These aren't things that people in high school do or have to deal with.

But I still feel young. I think about the world like everything could change tomorrow. Most likely it won't. I get up and have breakfast while I make our lunches. Then we go to work. I come home in the evenings and make dinner and go grocery shopping. We talk about buying a house, and make plans for vacations. But underneath all that, I think... what if this was all different. What if I woke up tomorrow a single girl living in a high-rise apartment in New York... or a young, pregnant, stay-at-home mother of three... or a starving musician, trying to scrape together enough cash for my next heroin fix? None of these are very likely. In reality, they're less than unlikely -- I just wouldn't do those things. But there's still that little thing inside of me that thinks...

What if I woke up as someone else?