Sixteen Candles and Midlife Crisis

The other day, while absent-mindedly flipping around on the teevee, I came across a favorite cinematic time capsule, "Sixteen Candles." It's been years...years...since I've actually sat and watched it, and I had housework to avoid, so I did. And it kinda messed me up a bit.
In high school, lines from this movie and the rest of the John Hughes canon constantly flew back and forth in the hallway between classes among my handful of close friends. Visions of Duckie Dale filled my daydreams and thrifting for Ringwaldian treasures took up many a Saturday. We were a bunch of little Smiths, OMD and Erasure freaks....high on hairdye fumes and banana popsicles. The world held so many possibilities. Potential romances, interesting careers, wild nights, vague European adventures and happy life journeys stretched out before us beyond the horizon of the Orlando city limits....in our imaginations, that is. Watching films like this again or hearing particular songs instantly rouses the sleeping angst within. Any Cocteau Twins song from the mid to late 80s is like a truncheon to the forehead, igniting a blaze of emotional time travel within in the first couple seconds of hearing. A couple perfumes cause this same phenomenon. Keep any whiff of Benetton or Opium away from me, or I get pretty wrecked for a while. Yes, the long lost angst comes flooding back in just a couple neuron fires. And that crushing general sense of romantic Hope automatically rears its head for a split second, along with all the notions of who I wanted to be and what my life could be like someday. Sometimes I feel it physically, even...somewhere in the center of my chest. Like a suckerpunch.

Until I remember...and this is the sad, deflatey part....that 20 years flew by. I'm 36. Possibilities have exponentially shrunk with each passing year, with each job taken...with each geographical relocation. With a naive marriage and later divorce, POOF! There went 10 of my years. Love is disappointing, but you could never have convinced me of that at 16, because I was certain I'd find my soulmate. (Pause while my 36-year-old self snorts and rolls eyes.) And then, with each passive decision not to pursue more education...poof! My house closing marked a dear dream come true...but also many many more possibilities evaporating. Poof! Poof! Perhaps subconsciously this has some play in why I remain childless....somehow, having a kid would erase even more possibilities. Atom bomb POOF!!
And, what am I doing with the possibilities that still may exist, pray tell? Not much, I'd say. It's a cruel joke...getting old. Now you have the ability to see realistic possibilities, but no longer have the chutzpah to go after them. Cynicism and self-doubt have done their dirty work.

At what point in your life do you stop and say: "OK...this is IT. I am who I am, I do what I do, I'm with who I'm with, I live where I live, I look how I look and I make as much money as I'm ever going to make. Ta-DAAA!" and wipe your hands together and rest? Because conceding to that just scares the hell out of me for some reason.

And I find myself mourning the past and my youth and all the moments I wasn't paying attention to as they were happening...missed opportunities, unwise choices. It's ridiculous, really, because I do know how life is and how quickly things can change. How circumstances can be extraordinarily, unbelievably different from one year to the next. I mean, I should know...only 5 1/2 years ago, my life felt cast in stone. Despite feeling utterly hopeless and stagnant and miserable and trapped, I mustered up something from somewhere and all but chewed my own foot off to change everything. I'd never have believed it if someone objectively described my present life to me, then. But so it goes. Even my own mother, at 67, has had major logistical life changes in the past several years. So, maybe there is more. It just seems safer and like more of a sure thing to pine for the past instead of the uncertain future.

I just don't know which is more frightening sometimes....the prospect of things changing, or the prospect of them not. Either one makes me shudder.

"Sixteen Candles" got me all worked up, indeed. Visiting Asheville, NC last month for work training didn't help things either. It was stunning there- landscape wise, culturally and general vibe. And I was told that if I ever wanted to move there, I'd have a job. And thus opened up a portal in my mind filled with scenes of mountain hikes and music festivals and less taxes and the Southern attitude that I still miss so much after living in New England for almost 13 years. Clean slates and new chances. I can see it all in my mind's eye...possibilities....

But they say, wherever you go, there you are. It is true. That's the problem.

I just sometimes wish I could go back to 1989 or so and start all over again.

But....I guess it's quite simply too easy to forget that Duckie Dale never even existed in the first place....and that every choice inherently excludes others. And we must do the best with what we have.

And maybe too easy to also forget that I am seemingly cursed with a restlessness that decends on some sort of cyclical schedule that I still haven't figured out. Mr. Hughes, you didn't help. Even with the edited-for-TV version.