OUT OF SEASON

I have a history of coming around to things at inopportune moments, of feeling out of synch, or like I didn’t get the memo.

What was I doing? Picking my nose? (I mean, maybe, but no.) Usually when I’m actively missing the bus I’m also actively engaged in some intersecting, but pointedly divergent, activity.

There was the time I went to chamber music camp and devoted myself to drawing people’s portraits instead of practicing. The whole two weeks were cleared to just practice, like, ten hours a day or some nonsense, and there I was, salivating behind a nub of charcoal.

Then there was that time I went to grad school for poetry, pretty convinced that was a pretty extra thing to do, and that the deeply invested believers around me were vaguely misled at best and self-involved pricks at worst, and then almost twenty years later I’m suddenly all POETRY IS THE WAY THE LIFE AND THE LIGHT WHY DOES NO ONE UNDERSTAND.

Or what about the time I went through high school and college actively eschewing all sports in favor of whingeing around on stage in various gilded costumes for Highly Sensitive People and then when I turned 82 and my body was like “hey hey ok we’re pretty much done here pass the liniment and the heating pad” I suddenly decided I was super into…