things that are finite

I read once, probably in what Jerry would call one of my "hokey New Age" books, that the human mind has a hard time reconciling the difference between finite and infinite quantities.
We do great with small numbers and objects (five cars, 16 candles, 22 ex-boyfriends). With nonspecific concepts and experiences, the brain has to shift into second gear: the number of stars in the sky, the total number of hours you've wasted standing in line, the number of days you have left to live.

The mind gets past this division by classifying many finite numbers as infinite, and vice versa. We know, of course, that there's a specific number of times left in our lives when we'll go to the grocery store, just as there's only x number of days until another terrorist attack happens on U.S. soil. We don't like to think about either scenario, so we take those unpleasantries and place them in the "Unknowable" box, which is another way of pretending they don't exist. Only when a number like that becomes known or knowable do we face up to it. Time does a weird lurching thing at that moment: It speeds up, and it slows down. The present instance can suddenly scare the shit out of you.

I was thinking about knowable quantities today during my morning walk to work, because for the first time I realized I'll only be making that specific walk a few more times. When I say "few," really it's more like "several," a number larger than 15 but smaller than 50. The word came down yesterday that my company is moving its offices, part of a tremendous crush of other changes not worth going into here, but transitions that are going to have a huge impact on what I do with my 40-plus hours of daylight each week. Because of this news, today has taken on a very different meaning: It's now a countdown until the new office. Really, this was the reality all along. There was always a finite number of days that I'd spend here in this specific office overlooking 7th Avenue, but my brain didn't like to look at it that way. It's better to pretend that everything will last forever.

Or is it?

Last weekend the BF and I traveled to Atlanta. It was our pre-emptive "We're Not Coming Home for Thanksgiving So We're Here Now" trip, which both families took better than we'd hoped.
I also had the chance to catch up with a few close ATL friends, and on Friday heard a bit of news that's been on my mind ever since. Crystal Covergirl, a fixture in the city's gay nightlife during the past several years, died suddenly in the early part of October.

Now, I couldn't call Crystal my "friend" — we said hello when we saw each other out, but I'm fairly certain she never knew my name. (Hell, most times when I saw her, I hardly knew it myself.) Still, she was one of those characters that Brad, Taures and I came to rely on in our clubworld travels. Her exploits became the stuff of legend: The night she half-accosted Brad on the back patio at Blu, that crazy thing she told Taures at Backstreet that time, the way she almost always had a cocktail in hand — usually in a plastic sippy cup. Good times. Silly, but good.
Looking back, and with the new knowledge that those experiences were finite, it pains me to know that Crystal passed away without me ever taking the time to really know her beyond a few pleasantries. If I knew then what I know now, well, I'm not sure if anything would have been different. But at least I would have known what was coming.

So what does the death of a drag queen I never really knew have to do with upcoming changes in my career? Probably not much. I guess both these bits of news just jar me a little, and make me stop for a second and count the number of buildings I can see out my office window right now, here on an otherwise chilly day in late October.