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Up until quite recently, things were going quite well for me. Then, things got either shitty, complicated, or ambiguous, on perhaps four vectors at once.

I am unquestionably in a better place than I’ve been in a while, but things are so damned opaque right now. I’m trying to see it all as an adventure, but mainly, things just seem unnecessarily hard over the past few days.

I’d like to think of a clever sign-off, but I’m confused, conflicted, and probably not in the best place to be making any public declarations about any of this. Still, I wish I could just have an easy button, you know?

SSB and I are doing the champagne and dinner by candlelight thing this weekend (complete with posh cheeses!), and while I’m pretty excited, there remains for me a sense of psychological vertigo associated with it.

It’s hard to believe, looking back, everything that has happened since New Year’s. Following my recent change at work, I found myself this afternoon packing for a move to campus proper. On my desk, squirreled away where I had somehow missed them in the initial sweep, I found a small hoard of receipts. On top? The Bard & Banker, from New Year’s Eve. So much has changed since then. So many people have entered or exited my life that the social complexion of my future has shifted completely.

For the most part, I am happy with the changes. But as hackneyed as it is to say, if you had told me five weeks ago what my Valentine’s Day, 2009, would look like, I would have answered with a mute look of commingled incredulity and pity, cocksure that I knew precisely what the future held. Cocksure, and completely wrong.

Between the personal changes and medical challenges experienced by myself and those closest to me, and my recent upheaval at work, the intervening time between tonight and that hazy evening at the Bard & Banker has humbled me, simplified and streamlined much of my life, taught me much about my limitations, shown me the true folly of my arrogance and hubris. While I remain a better man because of this unexpected instruction, nothing can change just how startlingly fast it came upon me, nor the fact that I am sometimes bewildered by it, still.

Gah. I hate this situation. I find myself with something it would really help to talk to someone about, but, well…as garrulous as I generally am, I tend to hold some of my metaphorical cards a little close to my chest. Stupid? Yes. Trite? Oh yeah. Predictable? Sure. Of my two closest friends, one I’ve never shared this sort of thing with, and the other is going through something so profoundly stressful and unpleasant that unloading on that person with this comparatively petty stuff would be kind of a failure on my part. I guess I’ve hoisted myself on my own petard, so to speak, by avoiding vulnerability through a refusal to share most truly personal things with even my very closest friends. Now, for the first time in months, I find myself with no one I am truly comfortable opening up to. Pleh.

OK, enough of that. Now enjoy this terrible SNL Digital Short with a disturbingly catchy song. I swear that I do not have a dance to go with this song. Nope, not at all.

Holy hell. Has it really been over four months since my last blog post? While it is tempting to give a personal State of the Union, cataloguing in exhaustive — and exhausting — detail the minutiae of my last third of a year, I’m instead going to talk to you about bananas.

The setting: a crisp Seattle morning, not long ago. The scene: a small bus stop at Denny & Fairview. As I dragged myself to the bus stop, sleep-weary and half-dreading the day, I pondered my recent string of uneventful, mundane days. Things were going well, sure, but the ineffable “spark” seemed to be fading. Then I saw them.

Two bananas, just sitting on the bench. Apparently clean and unmolested.

So when I stood there, looking at the otherwise abnormally clean — and hobo-free — bus shelter, and hearkened back to my previous incident with Metro Transit and bananas, it almost seemed as though the universe were sending me a message. The capacity for finding joy in life (particularly the “small things”), the ability to appreciate and embrace a simple species of joie de vivre, and to see magic in the mundane … well, these are concepts that are deceptively central to my life. And that’s all it takes, sometime: a banana where a banana has no business being.

Who left these?, I wondered, as my mind immediately began cycling through a vast panoply of potential explanations. Had a hobo left them, in a fit of produce-despising rare? Had a young coder, perhaps not so different from myself, forgotten them in an iPhone-inspired moment of mental abstraction? Had some kindly person left them there for me to see and be mystified by? These and other questions of no moment occupied me until the bus finally arrived, but my day gained a luster none of its siblings had recently had. Stupid, silly, and random, those bananas perked me up, reminded me how totally in love with life I am.

Life has been a bit of a rollercoaster for me since the last time I blogged. I’ve lost three dear friends; two to tragic and untimely deaths, and one to … well … attrition? I’ve met and fell in love with lovely, clever, funny, patient woman, with whom I’ve already shared a great deal of passion and forged an incomprehensibly massive collection of wonderful memories. I’ve made great strides in relearning French, and am again looking into a possible move to that distant land of smelly cheeses and smellier people. I’ve discovered that I don’t mind sleeping without earplugs, that Spanakopita is pretty much the most delicious thing on Earth, and that I will always be happier when I make time to read.

Oh, and that there is magic and whimsy in the world. I need only look to bananas to see it.