I’m twenty-eight today.

According to my old folklore professor, this is when people really come of age in modern society. Major social life changes, she says, happen in seven year cycles. Today, I am a man.

I’ve never been very good with “important birthdays.” My 18th birthday was arguably the worst day of my life. I was jet-lagged and almost completely slept through my 21st birthday. I can count at least four birthdays spent on airplanes. I had hoped to do better today, to mark it in some meaningful way, but so far, there is nothing dramatic, only more of the same. It doesn’t feel any different from yesterday or the day before. Arise, make coffee, come to work.

Perhaps there is a hidden lesson in this.

When I was in college, twenty-eight was the age I’d expected to finish my Doctorate, to finally be set and stable. As today has drawn closer and closer, a lot of questions have arisen in my mind, most of them not remarkably pleasant. Questions about goals and purpose, ability and expectations, and of identity. Every day brings more questions and fewer answers.

And now I have arrived at a point of no arrival, I am crossing a threshold that does not exist. Like any good liminal state, I am confused, humbled, and unsure. My assumptions, even those about myself, are apparently no longer valid. I am confronted with the prospect of creating them anew.

I’m twenty-eight today.

On the whole, I can’t say I’ve been enjoying the past few weeks. I’ve been more down than up, and even the good things tend to fade to neutral after only a few hours. But I recognize it has not been all depression and gloom, and I am grateful that soul-shattering despair has not moved in and starting drinking from the carton.

Yet I am frustrated. This grayness makes it difficult for me to fulfill the obligations that I have, to my family, my friends, my art and my company. Not to mention myself. It’s a tricky combination indeed, working at the question of your own value and purpose when you simultaneously feel that you are letting the things you care about down.

For those playing at home, I am not about to break. There’s just a lot on my mind.

In related news, I will know whether or not I am employed on Monday, and tomorrow I will be twenty-eight.

I’ve added a new song to the gallery, Unlikely. As I don’t have my mastering software at hand, I’ve put up the raw cut for now and will replace it with a more balanced version in a few weeks.

It’s a curious little exercise in forced minimalism. The only thing that gets “played” is a distortion unit attached to a short, uninteresting loop. The results are lush, sometimes melodic, sometimes textural.

I’m working with a less powerful computer for a few weeks, and so am limited as to what I can get away with with regards to complexity. I am heartened that the constraints will serve to motivate rather than stifle, and will produce some interesting pieces. As an old teacher repeated to me over and over again, “the more you limit yourself, the more freedom you have.”

It is very easy to overanalyze. To hear a word or two and spin them out into an entire novel. To let one’s imagination run wild into avenues that will never be. It is easy to do these things, and to live there, in that moment just ahead of now, in a future that shimmers and shifts and slides, a future built on a foundation of shadows of dreams.

It is easy to confuse what you know to be true with what you wish to be true, but it is very hard to disentangle the two.

My PC decided to lay down and die this morning. I only really use it for one game which I find myself playing less and less. I don’t think I’m going to repair it as it looks like quite a lot of hardware will have to be replaced and I can’t justify the cost. Delighted by that news, I lugged my PowerMac to the shop (again), leaving it there for 10+ days while they replace the graphics card and investigate some noise issues.

Fortunately the laptop I am currently typing on has so far proved to be the most reliable computer I have ever owned, requiring virtually no maintenance in 18 months, and leaves me with one working computer despite the departure of the other two. Sadly, it doesn’t quite have the oomph to handle my music software these days, so for a few weeks I’m on a forced composition holiday.

I am a thin person. I stand six feet tall and weigh in around 130 pounds, give or take a few; I’ve held this weight for 14 years now, thanks to a fast metabolism (yet another thing I can thank my parents for (in addition to excellent taste, good looks, and a winning personality. Hi mom!). Though I am dangerously underweight according to every chart and graph I’ve ever seen, all of the doctors I’ve seen have agreed that it’s not too much of a concern.

But now that I am running again, and running often, I am faced with a slight problem. I’m losing weight, which is most decidedly not good. While many people successfully use running as a way to lose weight, I am one of the individuals on earth for whom (luckily, perhaps), weight loss is not an issue. But I’m losing anyway; two weeks ago, eating my normal diet and exercising, I lost five pounds. Call Jenny Craig, stat!

I do not wish to become skeleton boy. The solution, of course, is to take in more calories. While replacing what I eat with a Super Combo McMeal or two would certainly double my daily intake, I don’t want to trade on potential health problem for another definite one either. So I’ve been making a concerted effort to eat “bulkier” foods, such as the homemade granola bars I bake up in the oven, and to eat them more often. Three meals has turned into five or six, and I’m almost constantly nibbling on fruit or bread. Eating only when hungry isn’t cutting it anymore. I am instead, according to my father “chunking it down.” Varia has been most supportive, allowing me to eat like a starving rabid mongoose; encouraging me, even.

If all else fails, I’ll resort to one of those muscleman “pump-you-up” drinks that manages to compress one third of the mass in the universe into an eight ounce serving, but I think I’m doing well so far. Last week I gained back my five pounds, and have been since hovering at the magical 130 again. I hope against hope that all of this work will perhaps, say, build some muscles that will make me naturally heavier.

Mythologist Stephen Larson wrote that “we are in a sea of symbols.” It seems apropos to think about the ocean on such a hot and muggy month where thoughts of a seaside getaway come into my head daily. There is mystery in the sea; rife with peril and promise, teeming with fish, sunken galleons, and symbolism.

July has, so far, not been the month of optimal creativity. Perhaps it is the sun, perhaps my mood. Perhaps it is my hardware. Tuesday night I was deep into working on an exercise that slowly shifted tonalities (from major to minor to quintal to strict 12-tone to free atonality, disintegrating back into major) over a deliciously banal drumbeat. All was well with the world until the monitor flashed and blacked out, leaving me stranded mid-song until I can take the machine in for repairs.

I could take a pessimistic outlook and bemoan my lack of output; I have a few evenings, after an alloted time of clawing for ideas. However, a more positive approach to things would be to imagine that where one portion of life is in decline, another is on the upswing. My personal Fortune’s Wheel.

What has been going on in relative abundance is me getting my act together. I’ve improved my fitness, my diet, my sleep schedule, my finances. I’ve taken the time to streamline things that have been bugging me for a very long time. I slowed down and taken stock of the things that are truly important and precious to me. Not a bad lot of work, all told.

It’s not as if I set out on July first to do all these things (”Okay Jeffrey, this month is ‘get your act together month’, huzzah!”), but that’s how things have played out, and I’m not displeased. Once things in my life get to an acceptable level of stability, I can throw back the wheel and fish for something more suitable.

I am officially registered for the Atlanta Marathon, which will be run on Thanksgiving Day. An ambitious goal, but well within the bounds of possibility.

This joke came to me by way of eavesdropping on a jovial fellow telling it to his friend, as I walked beside them in what was certainly the heaviest downpour I’ve been privileged to be caught in. I have certainly heard funnier jokes in my life, but the circumstances sharpened its effect in the same way that a mediocre beer tastes of ambrosia after a long day working in the sun.

At the end there was laughter and smiles, and the rain (which one can simulate by standing fully clothed in a cold shower) lost its sting. What weather can truly trouble a warm heart?

As I bounded down the steps of South Station today, I heard a familiar voice. Of all the subway musicians in all the stops in Boston, the sound of Amelia White never fails to bring a smile to my face.

It was a most unexpected surprise — hearing her these days is a rare treat indeed, as she’s gone on to Nashville to earn her well-deserved notoriety and fame. Every now and then, on days like today when she’s back in town, she stops off at her old subway haunts and plays for us hapless commuters. She recognized me and we talked for a while as I let a few trains go on without me, updating each other on our activities.

She is giving a few shows in slightly more accommodating acoustical environs, one of which I hope to attend. I left South Station with a grin and her music in my head.

I spent most of the weekend in the kitchen. Cleaning, organizing, and of course cooking. As I run further and more often, my body’s cravings have changed. Fruits, vegetables, grains. Especially fruit. A salad-bowl was deputized to become the permanent fruit bowl, and it is overflowing with bananas, apples, peaches and mangos.

It has been a weekend not of lofty thinking but of simply being. Slowing down, taking the time to delight in the actions of living. I feel relaxed and refreshed, mind and body.

I wish I had a hammock.

When I went running on Sunday, I got lost.

It was a long run and I didn’t feel like running back and forth three times on the same well-traveled path I use on my shorter jaunts. So I took that path instead of this one. And I got lost. Four miles out, carrying neither money nor id, not knowing how to get back, with rapidly decreasing confidence in my body to get me home.

This morning brings to mind the mensuration canon. It’s an old musical form which had its heyday five centuries ago, but it’s clever, and I’ve always been partial to it. The idea of a mensuration canon is that you start with a melody. Then you play a number of copies, say three, at the same time at different pitch levels

The trick is that each of the melodies take a different amount of time, so the first is played high and fast, and might need to be played through twice to match up to the second, flowing gracefully below. The lumbering third would be moving so slowly it wouldn’t ever get to the end. Imagine the melody of “God Bless America” this way, and give credit to the artisans of the past that they got this to work and sound good enough that people wanted to listen centuries later. Cleverness can last sometimes.

To take away some of their credit, music was more flexible back then; the symbols themselves lent themselves to it, but at the risk of this post turning into a historical notation lecture, I digress.

Mensuration in this specific use of the word doesn’t happen just in music; it’s around us every day. My seemingly doomed run was acted out twice, the first on Sunday in 90 minutes, the second in 5 days. Not the specifics, but the essence or structure of the gesture. I got lost, and it hurt, but I returned.

I sit here this morning as I did on Sunday evening, aching in places I didn’t know I had, looking back on the road I just travelled, wondering what I was thinking. I am sore, but I am reaffirmed. And while it was solely my own will that brought me home on the short trip, it was the support and care of all who are close to me that helped me home this week. For that, I am more grateful than you know.

My muse is, according to her last postcard, staying in Spain with Godot. I hope she is happy there; perhaps they will set up a villa in the countryside and have little ideas that never come to fruition.

But not being the one to leave me high and dry, she has sent along some of her friends to keep me company. Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia.

I need to make more room.