Moustaches and Timing
I only have time for a quickie this morning, as I wait for the moustache-removal cream to work before I run out and try to get to school with enough time to finish prepping for my political theory class, the topic of which is varieties of modern conservatism. By the time I finish with Irving Kristol and Alan Bloom, I’ll probably just be cranky. But tonight is the first Queer Faculty Social at my university, which I helped organize, so I’m excited about that.
Okay, what I’ve been thinking about lately is timing, and, like I said, I’ll have to make this quick. My friend (Andria) Marshall said a profound thing to me over a drink the other night, which I didn’t grasp at the time but has since begun to sink in. I was complaining about the fact that, in my search for life partner, I can’t seem to get the right person and the right circumstances combined with decent timing. This pisses me off, especially when it appears that universal timing seems to work in other people’s favor more often than it does mine. (I could give examples, but not with the moustache cream drying.) And Marshall said, in her typical cut-to-the-chase manner,
“Yeah, but don’t you think timing is all an illusion?”
“No, it seems pretty concrete to me,” was my reply. “For instance, E. could have been sent back to Colorado for her clinical year, like the Army said she would. But she didn’t. Which meant another year of long distance for us, if we could muster the endurance. So the timing didn’t work in our favor, and that made it so much harder. (Dammit.)”
Then she made me consider whether I could today imagine any of my previous girlfriends as my life partner, the person I’m really supposed to be with. The short version of the answer was, well, only a couple of them, and only if some major change or shift had taken place. Marshall was like, “Well, that’s the point. They might not have matched up with YOUR timing, but maybe each one of them came into your life perfectly timed for your growth.”
Hmm. Well, this seems easy to say for someone who more than eight years ago met a girlfriend who, it turns out, has shifted and changed along with her for all the intervening years between then and now. But, as I let the idea sink in, it does make some sense. The question then becomes, why am I so incredibly dense that I have to take not just my twenties but my whole thirties going (growing?) through a sequence of relationships before I can find myself ready for the right one? In other words, my own timing seems to be astoundingly slow. And that pisses me off.
By the way, the moustache cream didn’t fully work and I had to tweeze the buggers off my upper lip. Was that because I didn’t time it right?
Ok, out of time.
