Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I. . .

“I thought you got the day off,” I said, squeezing the phone angrily.

“Well, I have to work,” said the other person. “I’m not independently wealthy.”

I took a couple breaths and regained my composure. Sure, yet another scheduling snafu had arisen, but so what? That was everyday life on this movie set. “All right,” I said. “Just get here as soon as you can.”

I hung up and started pacing. Thanks to this new delay, I had some time to waste, so I spent a little of it mulling over this “independently wealthy” comment. It wasn’t the first time, or the last, that someone working on the movie would make some similar comment. I wandered out to the backyard and sat on the old yellow couch. Somehow, that bedraggled, odoriferous seat with its panoramic view of the tangled power lines crisscrossing the sky behind 312 Harvard SE was always a comfortable place to sit and think.

I'm often asked how much the movie cost to make. I've estimated that it cost something like $10,000, but that was really just a number I pulled out of my ass. Now I have a slightly better answer:$9,645.46. This isn't really the cost of the movie itself. That figure I may never know for sure. This is the amount my net worth has decreased since last year at this time. I guess you could say it's what I lost to make the movie happen.

At the time of this conversation, I was facing a serious shortage of funds. I’d spent all the cash I’d borrowed from grandma and maxed out my credit card. I still had a bit in savings, but if I drained that account completely I’d have nothing left. A week or two later I’d get a surprise call from an ex-employer who owed me some money and had decided to pay up. That money saved the last few weeks of production, but before it came I was really starting to worry.

It’s kinda weird to be accused of wealth. Accused is really the right word; an unmistakable barb of bitterness usually lurked beneath these offhand comments. Maybe it was just a bizarre paranoia of my own, founded on a few isolated and meaningless remarks. But it got me thinking. And today, as I sit at my computer desk in California, doing my end-of-year finances and sipping a Strawberry Manilow while watching the Twilight Zone marathon on the Sci-fi channel, I find myself thinking those same thoughts again.

During a road trip to Denver a few years ago, I was sitting in the passenger seat playing Solitaire on a laptop when a funny metaphysical thought struck me. It’s hardly a unique one, but as a metaphor for life it comes back to me now and then. You know the old fate versus free will debate? I never figured out a solid stance on that one. The closest I came to a resolution was my Solitaire compromise.

See, in each game of Solitaire, the cards are shuffled and their starting positions can’t be changed. In some games, the cards are arranged in such a way that it’s really impossible to win. Other times, the game seems unbelievably easy. Usually,it’s possible to win, but easy to make mistakes. You can’t change the order of the cards in the deck, but your choices make the difference between winning and losing.

Life’s the same way. There are things in life that can’t be altered by anyone’s choices. A star in a faraway galaxy is fluctuating, eating the last of its hydrogen and getting ready to supernova. No choice that anyone makes can stop it; the forces are already in motion. Its violent eruption may as well be a proscription of fate. Such a supernova could have already happened 35 years ago to a star 50 light-years away, and as we sit here scurrying about our earthly affairs the end of all life on earth is radiating toward us through the trackless depths of the Void. If such a card has been dealt for us, then all our choices are for nothing.

But on the mundane scale of everyday affairs, the outlook is a little less dramatic. The cards of your life are more often the result of choices other people have made than fated absolutes dictated by physics. Your birth, the people you meet, the virus you pick up. Some are just the thing you needed and some really ruin your day. And, for the most part, it’s what you decide to do about them that determines your success. Of course, in life, success is a little more subjectively defined than it is in Solitaire.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine said the oddest thing to me. He’s a cool guy, married, two kids, and owns his own business. Out of the blue one day while we were talking he said he envied me, what with my exotic and adventurous life of filming in Albuquerque, cavorting with beautiful actresses, and so forth. I was downright stunned. I mean, I enjoyed making the movie and all, but my life is hardly an enviable one.

Having the opportunity to live in Albuquerque for the summer and make a movie was partly because of the cards I was dealt, but much more because of the way I played them. I’ve made a lot of choices in my life, and I’m not happy with all of them. It’s the same with everyone, I suspect. We’re always haunted by the choices we didn’t make – the roads we might have traveled. At particularly introspective moments, we look at people who have things we don’t and wonder if we might have had that if only we’d handled those pivotal moments differently.

The people I tend to envy are the ones with independence and stability. The ones who’ve found a good woman (or man, whatever), make a living doing something they enjoy, own their own house. At times I wonder if I could’ve been like that. If only I’d used my good ACT score to get into a good college out of town instead of taking the lottery scholarship to UNM. If only I’d moved into the dorms as a freshman, met some new people, gotten some independence instead of staying in my parents’ house and spending time with my high school friends. If only I’d gotten some good internships instead of spending my summers having fun. If only I’d gotten a career-starting job instead of working part-time as a network admin and taking odd jobs on the side.

If only. . . but I didn’t.

So today, when I look at my life, I don’t see myself as an adventurous, wealthy cad, swooping through life and taking no prisoners. I see a guy who’s still single, lives with his grandmother, hasn’t had a steady job in two years, and who’s crippled by an inability to decide on a career. If a classy camera pan revealed Rod Serling standing unobtrusively in a corner of my bedroom, smoking his cigarette and smiling with that strangely stiff upper lip, and if he solemnly delivered to me an offer to trade what I’ve got for a life of contentment and responsibility. . . I might take it.

Would I be any happier? Probably not. A confidant of mine who I talked to about this recently suggested that I’ve made the choices I have because stability isn’t really what I want. If I did find myself in that position, it’d probably drive me crazy. You know that old saying, “Temet Nosce” (“Know Thyself”)? It’s funny how we really don’t know ourselves. We feel like passengers in our own brains, passive spectators of our own lives. Do we really understand why we make the decisions we do? Do we think about our choices before we make them, or do we only rationalize later?

In light of these airy musings, I’ve been trying to formulate a handful of resolutions for the year. This time last year, I set my sights on making a movie. Now that that project is barreling inexorably to its conclusion, what should my next objective be? Another movie? Starting some kind of business? A steady job as the start a good career? Or maybe just waiting to see which card is next in the deck?

Whatever I end up doing, I wish the rest of you the best of luck in untangling your own dilemmas in 2005. Happy New Year Everyone!