Dear Mila,
I guess instead of penpal they should call it pen-yourself. Ha! You know, because I’m writing to myself. But that’s not entirely true either. I’m writing to you, you being my ideal imagined audience. And who is reading it in actuality is 50% a mystery to me. Which is kind of exciting, but mostly predictable. And predictability is something we seem to mostly underestimate, or ignore completely. I am more and more convinced that much of my life is completely predictable. Pushing the obvious aside, like that I will set my alarm for 8:30am tomorrow but won’t wake up till around 11am, eat a bowl of oatmeal while watching something I’ve already seen on HBO. Or that I will drive to work and listen to “In the City” by the Eagles on the way in and will mostly dread seeing my ex-girlfriend while walking through campus (for no good reason, she’s a perfectly nice person, it’s just that she’s incredibly angry with me for many reasons, though I suspect just for one really). I will make my class laugh approximately 2.5 times, 2-3 will be absent, and most will think they have learned something, but will question what exactly that is by the time they get back to their dorms. I will rush home in incredibly slow moving traffic. Eat a turkey sandwich and cottage cheese. Rush to tennis practice, lose my breath, hit a few good winners, but mostly get frustrated at the number of unforced errors I will commit while attempting shots I am in no way good enough to pull off. At 8:30 I will make a game time decision to go out to dinner with the team or just go home, either way I will eat too much food. I will shower, get in bed and attempt to read for class or research but will probably surf the web and maybe read some pop culture junk novel that has nothing to do with my research interests. I will eventually watch a movie on my laptop and reluctantly go to bed somewhere between 3am and 4am. This is all going to happen with some high amount of certainty. And if it doesn’t happen exactly like this, there is still a fairly good likelihood that it will happen like this on Thursday. Wednesday’s off the books because my class was canceled. I have no idea what will happen Wednesday. Only the gods know.
My point is that for sometime I thought my life was rather unpredictable because I don’t have a job which requires me to be in the same cubicle every Monday through Friday at the same time. I don’t have a girlfriend and no longer have rituals I play out with her. My responsibilities are relatively low for a 30-year-old, so ideally I could do nearly any thing at any time. But I don’t, and I won’t. And I think this is because we’re mostly afraid of unpredictability. Salman Rushdie wrote in his wonderful novel, Shame, that part of what makes us human is our ability to move (in sort of unpredictable ways) and yet we constantly turn ourselves into trees and speak of having or making roots. The earth moves at incredibly fast rate, I mean literally. It is currently orbiting around the sun at approximately 66,622 mph. It rotates at about 1,037 mph along the equator. This is infinitely times worse than The Scrambler at your local 4-H Fair. This scares the shit out of me and I am happy to make roots to ensure I don’t lose my stomach. I know, I know, our small size, or the earth’s massive size, and gravity, including centripetal force, keep us firmly rooted and unwares at the god-fearing speeds at which we hurtle through the galaxy. I went to school, I did well. But don’t get me started on just how fast the galaxy is moving. With all this movement–of which though our brains tell us we do not feel, I am convinced our bodies are keenly aware–it is predictable that we don’t actually like to move and do unpredictable things.
Now it may seem that there are those people who enjoy unpredictability, being spontaneous, moving around a lot, but upon reflection, these people are just as predictable in their unpredictability as we are in our predictability. What’s more, is that these people’s behavior is not unpredictable at all to themselves. It is impossible to be unpredictable to yourself. You know what you are doing at precisely the moment you are doing it and most of time you knew you were going to do it ahead of time. So those of us who are afraid of being unpredictable are actually just afraid of being perceived as being unpredictable, which is an entirely different question.
So, when I started this column, I knew Mila Kunis would never answer. And yet for a moment I thought she just might be unpredictable and answer. But of course she didn’t. But if she does now, that would be entirely predictable.
Sincerely,
Kiren
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