I turned 35 today; it's definitely a surreal feeling (middle age); I guess I always call things surreal—what I really mean is it's a very real feeling… starting to understand what your parents and your grandparents and your neighbors and your coaches and your teachers felt and were going through during your childhood; when you relinquish the fantasy of being a young person forever, admit that you don't need to be a young person forever. You're just a person. You can just focus on your personhood.
My birthday party on Saturday, which wasn't technically my birthday, but it was an event, was special. I was out from 6pm to 6am. Dinner with friends, big party at a bar downtown, an afters at my friend's Art Deco penthouse, which pissed off her upstairs neighbor.
Even within New York City, there are so many unlived lives. Even within Manhattan, even within my neighborhood in Manhattan, I'm living unlived lives. As an artist, I'm living unlived lives. I don’t mind this; to live means to choose, to narrow. And faith, I think, relatedly has to do with accepting choice, accepting that you can't keep all of your options open.1
The difference between the artist and the hobbyist, for instance, is that the artist is someone who can select, reduce, decide, design; an artist is someone who's sovereign over a series of arbitrary decisions and is able to turn the contingent into the necessary. You think of the artist as someone who creates technical perfection, but in reality what they create is a series of choice that produce the feeling that the work was always there, that it had to be, when in fact they didn't; if the work didn't exist, then no one would be any wiser. It becomes necessary only by refusing contingency.
It's this sense—in that we can create necessity out of contingency, make contracts, agreements, commitments, rules, bonds, trusts, promises—our lives are a work of art.
I've never found it easy to change. My tendency throughout my adult life has been to...m maintain my habits and my baseline living situation, my romantic situations as long as possible regardless of their content and substance.