Much Ado About Nothing

For fear of loosing my readership, I figured it was damn fine time I started posting again. The time of course is 2:30 am, but then again I've slept for most of the day.

"Match Point" is a very good movie. It was so good it made me think. A central theme of the movie involves luck, a theme that is very cleverly woven throughout the plot. Talking to a friend afterwards over greasy chiken quesadilla at Rock Bottom, where the drunken fratboys of Emerson College go to pass out (Emerson frat boys...is there such a thing?), I stumbled onto some unfortunate truths: my life has been a series of lucky/unlucky accidents, proven over and over again by my meeting people at the a certain place, at a certain time. While I pretend to be weaving a master plot of career planning to delay an impending midlife crisis, I was overcome by a sense of inadequacy, realizing that it's all largely beyond my control.

Why am I at school in Boston right now? If you say incompetence and a laissez faire attitude that was perhaps too 'laissez' and not enough 'faire', you'd be half right. I sung in college. And it was this serendipitous pairing of my many delusions of grandeur coupled with a voice talent equivalent of Billie Holiday post-heroin that got me traveling the world. I coincidentally also met some very interesting people, like the drunk businessmen in a seedy Tokyo bar that told me a cash-strapped, doe-eyed boy like myself could make a lot of money in this town, in one night, at that steam bath place, in the Harajuku district. I politely declined the invitation for extra cash. Other invitations, however, were more substantial: working in an orphanage in south east asia, for example, sounded like it could have been fun. Four years later, I go to a health conference to find that the position I was offered before had connections to a project I could possibly be interested in. Lucky that. The project manager knows my contact. I could be off in 6 months.

I doubt I'm going to go, however. This opportunity didn't present itself at the right time. I need another round of luckily bumping into people, to work my 'magic' and razzle dazzle my way into a research project, here, in Boston, because it's part of my career planning. And so I'm stuck again in square 1, revising my initial assumptions about luck. Maybe I need it to come in pairs, like twin-prime numbers, ad infinitum. It's only lucky if you have time on your side, along with opportunity. Otherwise, it's just coincidence.