I’ve been preoccupied for the past few months wondering too many heavy things.

Okay, most of my life. Whatever. Potato, potahto.

At the dentist today, getting a tooth filled, I had to stop myself from asking how they know when they’ve got everything right, how this drill works, how the compounds set themselves. It’s a lifelong thing with me: wondering how things work. Wanting to understand the way things connect and correlate. I’m possessed of a desire to take everything apart, to poke around, and hopefully be able to put it back together. And this goes for everything from the VCR to life itself.

I’m fascinated, as some people know, by fractals and the Golden Ratio and the implications that the entire universe is built on numbers. I took psychology courses in college not so much to make a better profiler (thank god — that would have been a waste now, eh?), but to have a better understanding of what makes people tick.

Sadly, I also am possessed of the attention span of a 40-year-old computer programmer at the Playboy Mansion. I never had the ambition to take lots of science or math classes to more fully understand the things I’m curious about. In fact, my interests, while often cycling back to certain areas, tend to cover the range of the universe.

Maybe that’s actually a better thing for me, though — the more you learn about most subjects, the more you find yourself specializing. Were I a physicist, I’m sure that I would be balls-deep in quantum mechanics; a psychologist, exploring the connections between self-actualization and creativity. Instead, I wander to and fro, picking up crumbs here and there, and far more often than I should, I think, being able to make connections between this and that.

And I’m not sure, even after all this time, why I’m here (or that there’s even an answer to that — after all, any answer other than coincidence implies Intelligent Design and higher powers, and I’m not quite ready to accept those things as fact). I have no idea what I want out of life, what I want to be when I grow up, where I’m going.

But I’m getting closer. Maybe closer is the wrong word — it implies that there is an end to my quest, and I’m fairly sure there’s not. I’m feeling – what? Growth, definitely. Evolution. Progress. Like maybe I’m finally getting to the point where I’m almost done making stupid mistakes that create more little fires for me to have to put out, almost at the level where I can stop fixing my mistakes and start using and applying some of what I’ve learned throughout all my wanderings.

“The unexamined life is not worth living for man.” Plato? Socrates? Plato’s Socrates? No one knows. And maybe that’s the sort of stuff — trivial — that’s fun to pull out at parties, but ultimately unimportant.

Did Shakesspeare really write all those plays and poems? Does it matter? Those pieces are written and out there for us to enjoy. In the end, does it really matter, beyond an ultimately pointless sense of narcissism, who wrote them? There are no fees owed to the estates…. Of course, as someone partially consumed with the need to leave my mark on the world – possibly through an artistic creation – this is a funny thing to mention. Aware, that’d be me. But still, true — ultimately, unimportant.

Oh, and apparently, I’m an introvert. Never realized it…