Subject line:

Have you ever realized how email programs, blogs, and basically anything with a box for a body of text has a subject line above that field? I'm starting to question the nature of that. What if we don't know exactly what we're going to write? How do we name the work as a whole? Most often, I just end up putting something generic, like "hi" or "thoughts". But that's pretty lame, even when you don't stop to consider it.

So I've been doing things differently recently. Instead of fudging around for something clever but still broad enough to cover anything I might write, I've been filling that big box with my content, then deciding how I'll label it.

It's interesting how we try to pigeonhole these things into certain categories before we even start work on them. You can ask any kid what they want to be when they grow up, and they'll likely have and answer for you. When you look back in on their lives later on, how many do you think do what they say they were going to back when you first posed that question to them?

And yet they still tried to predict where they'd be. Maybe they did what they could to predict where they were going to live, how their house would look. Maybe they decided they were going to have three kids. Maybe they decided they were going to marry a doctor, or the sexy nurse. And maybe the next day, they played their first video game and were so awestruck that they decided they wanted to make video games. Screw the plans they laid out before.

And like that, the categories they had all set up for their life have changed in an instant. Or maybe it wasn't an instant, maybe it was a gradual decision to rearrange their life, but they still end up in different slots after a little bit of time. And then the old things they believed in are completely gone, never to be more than a faint echo of laughter on the back of their minds. How silly it was, a future like that. How silly, given the present. Now our futures are so much more clear cut than back then.

Or are they? I may be dead tomorrow. I may win the lottery tomorrow. I may get struck with the inspiration to write some fantastic triumph of independent poetry tomorrow. Or maybe I just get diarrhea and add Immodium to my grocery list. There goes another $3.

The one thing I've learned about life is that I know absolutely nothing about how anything is going to pan out. Not in a day, not in the next two seconds. There are times when I can make predictions with a great deal of certainty, especially in the video game industry, but that's about it.

And somehow, when I think I've mastered the minutia, something always jars me. rarely in a way I would expect, never in a way I would have hoped. Sometimes it's a good thing, sometimes it's a bad thing.

But I never label it as either until I've seen the consequences of it pan out.