In Search of Lost Time

I'm 36 today.

What did you get me?

The last time I wrote about my birthday was in 2003, when I turned 32. It was just after I moved back to North Carolina after what can only be called a disastrous four months in Los Angeles.

Things were looking up for me then. I had just gotten hired at Magnolia Grill, a famous restaurant (for North Carolina) I had gone to a few times in my twenties. I really liked it and I hoped they would hire me even though I had no fine dining experience. I couldn't believe it when they did. I was giddy about the place. Innovative food, chef-owned, near my apartment.

I also got hired to teach at Carolina Friends School. I applied to teach high school English but wound up with middle school US History. Today I'm restoring the previously suppressed teaching journals to sobsey.com, figuring that whatever adolescent identities I needed to protect have morphed enough by now. The difference between fourteen and sixteen is vast.

Four years is a pretty long time. I've quit teaching and Magnolia Grill since then; I bought an old house, fixed it up for a year (!), then moved out. In fact, I've moved four times since my 32nd birthday. I don't seem to be able to stop moving since I finished graduate school.

I went from having a genuine but uninformed and undiscriminating interest in wine to becoming a modest but serious collector. I bought a specialized unit to store wine in. (Don't worry, I went for a used one.) In a couple more years, I'll have some properly aged wine that I bought on release.

Since 2003 I've been to Amsterdam, Barcelona, Hawaii, New York (twice), Washington, DC, San Francisco (twice), New Orleans, Ecuador, and Austin. This globe-hopping is more impressive when you consider that I haven't left the state of North Carolina in nearly a year and a half. (And this was once supposed to be a travel web site.)

I got another tattoo. If I had a digital camera, there'd be a picture here, this being the interwebs and all, where you can do that sort of thing.

I got a freelancing job writing theater reviews for the Raleigh News & Observer; almost four years later, I got another one writing book reviews for the Independent Weekly. Today I have four different pieces of writing in these two publications. (Granted, the one about the Shostakovich documentary is only 66 words long.)

I won $11,500 in grants and fellowships, most of which I spent on the house I bought and no longer live in.

I revised and restaged an older play of mine in a mall in Chapel Hill. Then I wrote a new play, which opens in less than two weeks. It took more than a year to write and revise; I probably spent three or four hours working on it for every minute of elapsed stage time. The play opens in the same mall where I did the previous play. I am turning into the Bard of University Mall. I hope to stage the next one in the Chick-Fil-A.

At the risk of tooting my own horn (it's my birthday, so I'm allowed), this new play is the best one I've written so far. I don't know if audiences will like it; I suspect the critics won't at all; it might piss off some people that know me. But if even some of this goes right, my life is going to change significantly and for the better.

I'm a writer. Finally. I spend my days writing. And reading, which is part of writing. Six hours a day, eight hours. I quit teaching so I could do this. To a lesser degree, I even quit Magnolia Grill so I could do this. My whole life and apartment are organized around writing and reading. This February, I read the third volume of Proust, aloud, and loved it. I read the first two during my trip to Southeast Asia. At one point I argued parenthetically that the old Moncrieff title, Remembrance of Things Past, was "absolutely in the spirit of the work," and it is. But having read Mark Treharne's rendition of The Guermantes Way, under the aegis of a new British translation series published as In Search of Lost Time, I've decided not only that the latter title is (obviously) more semantically accurate, but that it's also truer to Proust's essence.

I don't sleep as well as I once did. I think it's a simple function of getting older. I frequently wake up at 5:00 AM and can't get back to sleep. So I write. I wrote this post in the early hours of the morning. I also wrote this one in the pre-dawn dark, and another one that I had to take down because, sadly, its thesis turned out to be untrue.

I sent Eve a letter in January 2004, telling her she'd never hear from me again, and that I'd like the same treatment from her. I've held up my end of the bargain, and she has almost reciprocated. Eve seems to have inadvertently added my name to a list of people she has been communicating with. Every so often, in the course of a few hours, I'll get a volley of emails apparently about fair trade coffee. It's a little like watching foreign television: I can't understand what these people are talking about, it happens too fast for me to piece it together, it doesn't really interest me much to begin with, and I am clearly not the intended audience for the dialogue; but it's strangely entertaining. And there is Eve's name and email address. It's disquieting (so to speak) to think of how easily I could break the silence. But I'm not going to.

Since my 32nd birthday, my sister, whom I love, has gotten married and divorced.

I still wait tables, but somewhere else. I got tired of working for a tyrant.

What am I doing for my birthday? I was going to go to a Durham Bulls game this afternoon, but it's raining. Tonight, a friend and I are planning to go to Magnolia Grill for dinner. I'm going to bring a bottle of expensive wine from my cellar.

And next week I'm going to go to Washington, Philadelphia, and New York.