I went on my first blind date tonight. Blind, but not deaf-- we’d talked on the phone several times before getting together. Seeing Matt for the first time was jarring, not because he is unattractive (he’s not) but because he didn’t look like how I expected, which made me realize that I’d had an image of him without knowing it and that made me wonder what other unnamed expectations lurk in my subconscious...

I know I expected something different in my life right now, something more definitive.

“There’s more than one answer to these questions
pointing me in a crooked line
And the less I seek my source for some definitive
the closer I am to fine”

--Indigo Girls “Closer to Fine”

Do all roads leave to Rome? Does it really matter if I go to France in a month or in a year? If I try to make Breast Play national now or later? If I go on that second date? When it comes to discerning my future, I long for answers, for the definitive. I’m afraid of deviating from the path even though my entire life has probably been nothing but a series of detours and diversions. Ours is a culture that relies on snap judgments, perhaps out of necessity. A fast paced lifestyle doesn’t leave much room for leisurely getting to know someone and figuring out where they fit into your life, if at all, because we’re constantly thinking about the finish line and who will help us get there, to 2.5 kids, the white picket fence and a mini-van. You know the clichés; you’ve heard them all before and maybe, like me, you deny wanting them, wanting to get to the end of the race, but you do. On some level, you want it bad. Because you’ve been conditioned to; we all have. Or maybe we really want it. But we’re too busy racing to that finish line to figure out if that’s where we want to be.