With a mere seven days to go until I'm married, I thought it would be worth taking a look back at how I spent my final year of bachelorhood.
I'd say it was pretty much wasted.
Ideally, this should have been a time of great productivity. The summer, in particular, should have brought a rich harvest of my labors. Alone, isolated, with absolutely no social life at all to speak of -- I should have been able to read more, write more, and even goof off more than any other time of my life.
Somehow that didn't quite work out. Don't get me wrong. I did plenty of work...but not as much as I would have if I were an inspired genius. I have a stack of unfinished projects pathetically piling up on my imaginary to-do-list.
Perhaps the most striking phenomenon of isolation that I observed was how unstoppably fast time seems to go when you are not have fun--especially when school was out. For instance, I can't tell you on what day I accomplished any given task this week. I feel as though I skipped from Monday morning to Friday night. It's alarming. Any individual day (and I can really only use this one as an example) seemed to only start around 4 PM -- but by then, I'm thinking about dinner, and then winding down for the evening. Goodness knows I don't have anything interesting planned for the evening.
I feel like a retired widower pretty much just waiting for the grim reaper to show up at the door. I may well have ennui.
While living in quasi-hermitage, I've developed a horrible knack for making awkward chit-chat with store clerks. I'm pretty sure I'm known as "that guy" at every coffee-shop and sandwich place in a twenty-mile radius. And I pretty much only go to such places just to be have other people around...you know...in case one of them might actually make the mistake of talking to me.
It might not be so bad if I was hermit living out in a desert, apart from society. The most torturous thing is, perhaps, seeing oneself surrounded by families, couples, people, and having to slink about, almost suspiciously, by oneself. It's enough to turn one into a Grinch...or a Grendel. (Okay, now I have to go write an Anglo-saxon version of the Grinch where Beowulf rips his arms off as he tries to steal a Christmas tree...)
I've also developed habits like: not closing doors while I use the bathroom, leaving my worn socks next to my bed until there are enough of them to warrant a trip to the hamper, taking my clothes straight out of the dryer rather than putting them in drawers, staring out my window for minutes on end, and speaking in strange tongues while walking around the house. It's not even a matter of talking to myself...I've managed to start talking to myself in nonsense words that I don't even understand. I'm sure there are other awful habits that Isabel will discover in the coming months.
It makes me understand more fully the importance of religious forming communities, and why Jesus made sure to send the apostles out in pairs. I used to think it was more of a matter of keeping them honest...but I think it might have been just to keep them from going crazy. Which brings me to my final reflection for the moment, which is how this year of solitude has made me appreciate more fully the nightmare world that many of our elderly must be living in today. There was a time when I thought retirement seemed like a pretty sweet deal. Now, it seems like being lost at sea.
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