A whopper of an existential crisis.

So I'm visiting my folks on the long weekend, and the topic of conversation turns to the windmills that are going up all over the place in southwestern Ontario.

Me: "I dunno, I kinda like them."

Mom: "Oh no, they're terrible. We don't want 'em."

Me: "Well, nobody really wants them in their back yard, but they've gotta go somewhere."

Mom: "But they wreck the soil. They drive the worms out when they pour the concrete pad, and that makes the farmland less productive."

Me: "It's a small price to pay for totally green electricity. Rather that than have coal spitting out carbon dioxide all over the place."

Mom: "Well, you don't know what it's like, you don't live here anymore."

And it's true, I don't, and I haven't lived in rural southwestern Ontario since 1996. But that's been stuck in my head the past few days, and I can't get it out.

Here's the crisis:

Am I a small-town person or a big-city person?

Naturally, my instinct in states of indecision or confusion is to draw a diagram. So I whipped up a spreadsheet and figured out how long I've been living in each place.

That's the basic idea. ("London," for the record, is the real one: London, Ontario. And I technically lived at RR#1 Deep River, but that's close enough.) There were various places in Waterloo and Kingston and Toronto that I've lived in, and technically I lived in pre-amalgamation North York for four months, but if it's the 416, let's classify it as Toronto.

This is a lot of colours, so we can simplify a bit. I'll consider Inwood and Deep River to be small towns; Waterloo, Kingston and London are small cities; Toronto and Calgary are big cities.

Small town still wins, but we're getting closer to 50-50. Finally, if we consider something to either be "a small town" or "not a small town," I think you know how this is going to go.

And there you have it. But, in my defence, my small-town years were my formative ones, so they probably count more than their 49% suggests. So, if I had to classify myself these days, let's go with...

Small-town roots but with a big-city veneer on top.

Yeah, I think that works alright.

Ugh.

Every so often, I have an existential crisis.

• What am I doing with my life?
• Am I just an idiot man-child?
• How am I, in any way, a functional adult male?

This is neither the first one I've had, nor is it the first one about which I've written. Most of the time, naturally, these crises are brought on by my generalized lack of success with ladies... which has been a pretty regular feature of my life these days, let me tell you.

(But honestly... I think about the last few women I've gone out with, and... well... they just didn't fit, alright? One was jumpy/wacky/nutty, another was just flat-out boring, and the last one was waaaaaay too politically correct. Not that I'm not PC, because I am, but absolutely insisting that we meet up at an independent coffee shop rather than a chain? That was red flag numero uno; not that I'm against the indie places, because I'm not, rather the strenuousness of the insistence. I guess you had to be there.)

I was bemoaning this fact to a friend recently, including the bulleted points above, and the reply was the standard one: "J, you've got a successful career, a place of your own, several degrees, a car, and you've travelled around. You've accomplished a lot." And yeah, she's right, I'm awesome. So then I started thinking a little more about these crises, and about how our minds and memories work in general.

It's easy for us to see the things we don't have, because we spend a lot of time already thinking about these things; they're at top-of-mind pretty frequently, and we can recall them at a moment's notice. But the things we do have, even if they're significant accomplishments... how much time do we reflect on those? "Gee, let me take twenty minutes and reflect on how rare it is, in our society, to have a degree in physics from one of the most highly-regarded technological universities in the country. ... Boy, that's a swell thing I did." *

And so, my bitching and complaining seems, yet again, rather foolish. I mean, sure, I haven't accomplished all I'd liked to have accomplished by now; if I had, I'd sure as hell be knee-deep in naturally-blonde left-handed Korean supermodels multiple nights per week, while playing a defensively-solid third base for the World Series champion Detroit Tigers. But hey, navel-gazing is a natural human pastime; we all fall prey to it, now and again -- and I'd argue it's a powerful force which propels us forwards to check even more stuff off our lists.
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* Not to toot my own horn or anything, but... beep-beep.