Black Birds frying on a wire

It is far from an overstatement to say that the vast majority of writing I do focuses on media - on music and movies and television, books, or celebrities. It is true that since I was 13 years old, I wanted to be a film critic. I was a film critic, in fact, for some time, and hope to find work in that field in the future. It is also true, then, that virtually all of my public writing deals with my personal life only insomuch as it relates to whatever media topic I feel like writing about.

This is my approach, and "approach" would be the word I would use when getting defensive, although I'd most prefer to not defend this decision at all.

At age 24, things get difficult for a person, and although this sense is perhaps well documented by now, I localize my own experience to this age. At age 23, I had just graduated college, worked at a photo lab for some time, spent some more time unemployed, worked briefly in the corporate world, and settled, 9 months later, at a comfortable job working with emotionally disturbed adolescents. I also ended a year-and-a-half long relationship, decided against an impulsive move to New York, took a mind-scrambling vacation to Los Angeles (a place, I find, where mind-scrambling is an endemic sensation) where I thought for a brief week or two I'd fallen in love again, but none of that had the intellectual impact of turning 24.

At 24, things start to feel important because nothing seems to have much weight anymore. Or at the very least, at 24, a veil of order gets lifted, and things seem confusing only when words get put to them. For a while, I was listening to Neko Case's "Things That Scare Me" because the line "Flourescent lights engage/ black birds frying on a wire" seemed an image of actual substance. The song concludes with the line "I am the dying breed who still believes/ hunted by American dreams," which I identified with but less so than an image of man's conventions having a stranglehold of nature, of birds being electrocuted at the flick of a switch.

In this year, all that truly made sense was my confusion. I took a trip to Israel, where I cried at a Holocaust memorial (crying being the rarest of events for me), and where I felt, for the first time ever, linked to a community, which I suppose is the reason young Jews are encouraged to take trips to Israel. I was being groomed for promotion with at my day treatment center, I had my first essay published (on Fiona Apple, of course), and I decided, as if the most natural of whims, to pick up and move to Seattle, a city that, at the time of my decision, I had never been to, and before my move (this coming Tuesday), I'd spent only 3 days in.

I don't truly know how to discuss the thoughts of my move, or, truly, how to represent my thoughts in any particular light because the thoughts are of such a peculiar shape. What I can say is that I feel elation about moving only as much as it can share space with my terror on it - of leaving the kids I worked with, of leaving my amazing cadre of friends, of leaving the comfort and ease of living in a city like Boulder, which is, it seems, about the easiest place on the planet for a confused white liberal to live.

I bring up this subject thinking about a couple of - naturally - some television. This past season of The Sopranos has been derided by many, but it may be my favorite. I'm thinking of an image in the episode "Cold Stones" - Edie Falco's troubled Carmela stands in Paris looking at the turning beacon atop the Eiffel Tower early in the evening. The scene cuts from her position on her sidewalk to returning to the living room of her New Jersey home. Carmela had been brought to tears at a site of millenia-old ruins ("All the things we do, in the end, it just gets washed away," she said).

I know what Carmela is thinking in this scene, and if you believe myself to be projecting life unto a fictional character, I think you are missing the point, and the thing that makes The Sopranos such an accomplishment. I know what Carmela is thinking because it is not representable in a sentence, not in words, simply the notion of confusion, of being allowed to see a distant place and forced, in that space to confront the theme of this Sopranos season: who am I, where am I going. Let me simply say this about The Sopranos, because it is not, directly, my purpose here to talk about it: To know, even approximately, by simple observation the thoughts of another human being is the most important of artistic accomplishments. It requires an understanding of the human experience that is beyond familiarity, because only experience can create it. That it does this is impressive, but that it sometimes flits around the edges of thoughts which cannot be fully elucidated makes it the most triumphant of works.

What I am saying is that confusion about life is sometimes the thing of the most palpability and substance, but it is not often a topic of conversation because its very existence denies understanding what it is. One could say "I am confused," but even that would undersell the actual sense that invades and alters behavior. What I mean is that in human events, sometimes the action and the thought are related, sometimes they are bound even in the absence of any clear connection. I am moving in three days, and I hope sincerely the move pays off for me personally, that I am not defeated by the circumstances I've created for myself. The reason why, although I can't reasonably articulate it, flits around me every day in this incredible year I've had, and it is not because I am unhappy (I am not), bored, or full of malaise. In truth the best explanation I have is just that I am 24 years old, which is for me the age when people are compelled to do this sort of thing, and the "why" of it either manifests itself or does not.