My future with Justin Timberlake

I'm a 36 year old anesthesiologist with a daughter, a wife, and a mortgage.  In high school, I prepared for college.  In college I prepared for med school, then residency, then fellowship, then the real world.  Now I'm here.

So what now?

There's nothing to strive towards other than the goals I set for myself.  I must admit, however, I am neither menacing nor a particularly good task master.  Why the hell should I listen to me?  Certainly I could write a novel, master Jujitsu, trek the Sahara, publish scientific and philosophical articles, climb mount whatever is the tallest.  Or I can veg out on the couch and watch Jersey Shore.  Who's going to stop me?  Me?  I weigh all of 145 pounds.  I could kick my ass!

I do have plans, however.  I want to be a writer.  Novels, plays, screenplays, and apparently blogs.  But let me tell you how I envision this goal: dancing with my wife to Justin Timberlake's SexyBack at an after-Oscar party sipping Cristal until 4 a.m.  (Realistically it would be a Corona and we'd be back by 11 using the babysitter as an excuse while hiding our obvious exhaustion from staying up past 10.)  That's my writing goal.

What I'm hoping to find out from you is that this is a normal goal for a 36 year old anesthesiologist with a daughter, a wife, and a mortgage.

Right?...
Hello?...
Bueller?...

Pity party for my inner hypochondriac

As with all psychopathologies, it is best to place the blame on one's parents.  My father had significant cardiac disease with a heart attack at 38 and 40 and sudden cardiac death at 57.  Since I became a physician, I retrospectively diagnosed him with obstructive sleep apnea, peripheral vascular disease, and metabolic syndrome.  He wasn't on a statin or an aspirin, and he was on an anti-arrythmic that causes sudden death.  In other words, there are six things off the top of my head that could have been done.  (I could have done?  Guilt is our most constant companion.)  Moreover, he ate like shit, smoked, drank too much, and barely got off the couch.  (As an aside, this isn't to berate my dad.  He was a remarkeable man.  He was the most insightful and intelligent person I have ever met and treated me with the utmost love and respect.  He just didn't treat himself with love and respect.)  His disease, although mixed with genetics and bad luck, was mainly due to a lack of action: not taking the proper meds; not exercising; not eating well; not receiving the proper diagnosis; not getting surgery; etc.

So I take action.  I eat (sorta) well; I exercise; and I take a statin and aspirin.  The problem I have is my near obsession with action.  My hypochondria clusters (and they do come in clusters depending on what is occurring in other aspects of my life) are less about the disease process and more about what I have to do about it.  Go to the doctor; make sure s/he does the correct tests; wait it out; not wait it out.  The possibilities are endless.  I start to malfunction because I am convinced there is something that I am not doing.  I often think that it would be easier to live during a time when there was very little we could do with illness (assuming that there was minimal diagnosing; it's worse to have a disease with a name but no treatment).

The problem is, when you look closely at it, there is no "correct" thing to do.  It's all probability.  I am not trying to imply that there is no such thing as preventative medicine.  My grandma lived to 88 as a lifetime smoker, but for everyone like her, I can find 100 smokers that died of a heart attack, emphysema, stroke, or cancer.  Taking control of my eating and exercise simply gives me the illusion that I have control over the possibility of future heart disease.  It certainly puts the odds in my favor, but it is not control.  I have no control over any future disease state.  This is truly an existential dilemma: I have control over what I do now (i.e. not smoke or eat like shit) but have no control over the future (i.e. heart disease or lack of it) despite the fact that I put an enormous amount of thought and meaning into it.

When faced with our mortality, it again comes down to the ability to surrender to the present.  I (we?) need to reposition the meaning and magnitude of our existence within that existence and not in what may be.

The mini-van and the death of self

My wife won't let me buy a mini-van. I want one because it's spacious; it has little TVs that silence two-year olds; it can go the 80 miles an hour that I don't go beyond anyway; it allows for easy clean-up of the ill-defined baby particles that seem to make their way onto the floor and seats; and it has floor stow away things that serve no real purpose but are cool anyway.

But it's a no go. It's a no go because it marks the death of what we could be. Our future rock star selves. The one's that put the baby to bed at 7, arrive by plane to the Baja coast by 11, drink shots dripped through each other's ass cracks, and be home in time to film our American Idol audition songs before our baby wakes up. A mini-van marks the death of a dream. We are our parents. We are the middle class.

I am the worst perpetrator of this fallacy of identity. I am a writer even though my books and plays and whatevers haven't been written yet. I am a jujitsu master that can defend my family with Jason Bourne-like skill even though I haven't really committed to practicing the art. And I am a great husband and father because of these things I'm going to do, not the things that I am doing.

This is a big problem; a big, under-recognized problem. It is not the dreaming that's an issue. I believe possibility to be a great source of inspiration and productivity. It is the narrative we build - that thing we create to bridge the pinpoints of our lives into a false fluidity - that is the problem. Somehow with our perceived future weaves its way into our present and, in some ways, dominates it. We begin to think we are what we want to be.

Sartre stated that we are what we are not and not what we are. Utterly confusing but expected from a man who thought he was being chased by gigantic lobsters through his amphetamine haze. Confusing but insightful. We are what we are not: we are our projects, our expectations, our goals. We are not what we are: we are not our present selves but instead what we are working towards. To some extent this is healthy. If we cannot own our future selves in some way now, what would be the point of working towards anything? Sartre was a perfect example of how this can be healthy: he was striving towards something but actively doing something about it now. He was a philosopher and writer so he wrote everyday (enough for 20 pages a day for his entire lifetime). He was active. He lived his future in his present.

I don't think most of us are like him. We get lost in what we are not. I explain why I'm a writer instead of writing. I explain to my wife why I'm a good husband instead of doing what it takes to be one. I abstract myself from my present.

I'll be coming back to this idea of the present a lot. Although impossible to pinpoint, this now, this present, this whatever the fuck this is that we're truly living in is the only thing that's real. The past is misconceived, misconstrued, and misinterpreted. The future is undefined, unpredictable, and unsustainable. The present defines us. The rest is false narrative.

But fuck the mini-van. I'm getting a Porsche. It fits my Hunter S Thompson meets Bruce Lee persona better anyway.

Sartre: www.sartre.org/
Stow-Aways (love 'em): www.helium.com/items/785698-pros-and-cons-of-stow-n-go-seats-in-minivans