Why hello there, Grown Up Man Child. Welcome to the show...

Maybe it's all of the fresh air and sun I've been getting (or the lack of oxygen due to the relatively high altitude I'm at here in Utah), but I've been going through a great deal of reminiscence/recollection/retrospection/what-you-will. I've been thinking a lot about ex-girlfriends, ex-friends, family members who have passed on, and generally everyone and everything that I either miss or which holds some pang of regret in the deep recesses of my mind.

Now, with this healthy (it's healthy, right?) dose of nostalgia rushing through my brain, I am also beginning to focus a bit on what's to (potentially come). Maybe I'm growing up, maybe I'm attaining wisdom, maybe I'm bored with where I'm at in life and I'm looking for a change. Maybe it's a bit of everything...the confluence of the rivers of my past and potential coming into one stream. Or something.

Many of my close friends are either married, damn close to getting married, or are in a pretty solid coupling of sorts.

And my mom is getting older. Sixty soon...it blows my mind. I don't want her to age. I want her to stay looking like my mom...and not like my grandmother. I want her to look like a grandmother when I have kids. Not before. And I want to be able to make her retirement comfortable at the same time. Me. Who still on occassion acts like a brash 18 year-old living off a trust fund.

Yeah. Me. My friend Lara has a nickname for me: Crazy Uncle Justin. I'm going to be the single guy constantly hanging around his married friends, playing with their kids while fielding their questions as to when he's going get married, constantly being farmed out to all of their single friends in the hopes that one of them will work out...you know, like Bobby in Companyfor those theatrical folk out there keeping score.

However, I'd like that to change. And I'm sure that it will, eventually. I guess it just seems like the Wild Oats have been MORE than sowed in my case. Time for some substance.

I also think this line of thought is stemming from the recognition that I may need to amp up my artistic discipline a little. Year One of grad school fried my brain a bit, and then I jumped into this great job at Utah Shakes...which has led me to realize that the acting part of the life is easy...maintaining the ability to continue to act is the hard part. It all goes back to the analogy that my acting coach at Illinois used in class one day: "If you want to be a brilliant painter, you have to love cleaning your brushes."

So, maybe it'll reach the point in this dense head of mine that I'll start paying more attention to maintaining my art, and as a consequence my life will begin to take care of itself. We shall see.

In the meantime, hiking is good. Hooray.