This is how I live: the same way I watch TV, hitting that channel button every few seconds, relentlessly scanning. I use my television set like a slide projector. The light in my living room flashes on and off -- next, next, next. There are so few shows worth looking at too closely, or for more than a few minutes at a time. My life? No different. I don't stay on any one thing for too long. So if you get bored, you won't be bored for long. My problems. First, I watch far too much TV. To give you an idea, this is me on Echo, the online service I founded and which is in trouble, where people log on to talk about whatever: "Why didn't someone tell me it was this late? Here I've been, reading and writing for God knows how many hours, when I could have been watching West Wing. Do me a favor? If you ever see me logged in during the important TV hours, please remind me to log off." Second, I'm forty-two and single, and while I have pronounced myself ready to settle down, I am as far from marriage or anything like it as I was when I was sixteen. I'm lonely and yet don't make a tenth of the effort with romance that I make in every other area of my life. I work at least eight hours a day. Why don't I spend even half that looking for love? I'm a coward. No, it's because I want it this way. My friend Steven says I could be married within a year if I really wanted to be. No! It's because there are no men. It's not my fault. That's it. No, I scare them. A popular explanation with other single women I know. There's something flattering and also comforting about thinking we're intimidating. If we weren't so fabulous and strong everything would be okay. Right. Crazy people find true love. People in prison manage to get married. There must be something wrong with me. "There's something terribly wrong with me and no one will tell me what it is," I insist to my friends. I don't know. I don't know how I got here. Third, as I said, Echo, my business, is in trouble. I don't care, really. I am sick to death of new media. I would much, much rather watch TV. It's time to move on. But how am I'm going to pay for this laptop I'm typing on? My first book didn't sell well. No one wants my novel. I don't know what I'm going to do with myself. Not one single area of my life is settled. Oh, and I have two diabetic cats: Veets and Beamers. I have to give them insulin injections every twelve hours. It's worse than that. Beamers has failing kidneys and has to get an subcutaneous drip every other day, and he also has a stomach thing I can't spell or pronounce. When I meet new people and tell them about my cat situation they ask, "Why don't you kill them?" People. Because I can lean down and sniff my cats' heads and smell earth and trees and leaves -- it's a swampy smell, the scent of eternity, the opposite of the smell of bleakness. A small comfort perhaps, after all that work, but that pretty much describes everything. Last, I spend way too much time with death. I buy every death book, go to every death movie. Instead of tripping from club to club like the party girl I was in my youth, I spend my free time going through boxes in abandoned basements and attics and hacking my way through vines and thorns in forgotten cemeteries. I want to unearth the unremembered, because if I can resurrect these abandoned histories I win. That's what it feels like, anyway. This is about my midlife crisis -- or rather, my early-onset midlife crisis. I'm always rushing things. If something bad is going to happen I'd just as soon have it happen now and get it over with. I'm writing about what I'm going through while it happens because writing about it contains it and makes me feel like I'm one step ahead of the game. I'd read about midlife if I could, except there's nothing out there that doesn't feel like work to read. Gail Sheehy makes me want to hit someone. I admit I've never read her, but the idea of a book called Passages annoys me. I think life basically sucks. I'm stealing from my friend Liz Margoshes, who says, "Life sucks, essentially." (I have to give credit where credit is due.) Growing old is not so freaking wonderful. What is wrong with people? I hate Lauren Bacall and that supposedly healthy I've-earned-my-wrinkles, dammit attitude that she and others have. Lauren? What follows growing old? Death, thank you. If Gail Sheehy had named her book Passages Suck but What Are You Going To Do? she would have had me. I went to a conference called Hope a couple of months ago and the most hopeful thing I heard was this: "Life is hard, with a couple of moments of glory in between." I don't remember who said it, so I cannot give credit where credit is due. I only bring it up to head the well-why-don't-you-just-kill-yourself people off at the pass. (I don't know what "off at the pass" means exactly.) A few moments of glory. It's enough. We've all read about how men act out their midlife crises over and over and over. Yeah, yeah. What do women do? This book will show you. I've started to act out in all sorts of ways. My pain will be your amusement. I'll flip through the various channels of my life, going back to some more often than others because there's more happening on these channels, or because I'm more obsessed with these channels, or because I can't help making the same mistakes over and over -- don't sleep with musicians, don't sleep with musicians -- it's my new rule, which I will ignore the second I get an opportunity, except those opportunities don't come like they used to, like the every-weekend glory of my twenties. And guess what? It only gets worse. I don't know what I'm going to do. I'd like to give it all up and hit the road, where it is easier to pretend that everything goes on forever. I'm just waiting for my cats to die. Then I'll quit. But is quitting liberation? Or hiding? Who am I kidding. It's an excuse. Like my life is my cats' fault and I'm off the hook until they're dead. My cats must live forever. This is hard. Growing old is hard. Plus I'm alone. And then there are my sick cats. I'm scared. But not always.   [HOME]