What is your New York age?

Apparently my New York age is 33.

My actual age is also 33.

I’m not sure what this means.

When I was in high school, I discovered Herman Wouk’s great fictional two-volume saga of World War II, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. Together, the books are a sweeping history of an American military family and Jewish Europeans during World War II. The first book begins around the time of Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 and ends with Pearl Harbor; the second book begins shortly thereafter and goes until the end of the war. Both were turned into lengthy TV miniseries in the 1980s.

I was vaguely aware of the TV version of “The Winds of War” when I was a kid. Several years later, in the fall of 1988, my family moved to Tokyo. During the three years we lived there, our friends back home would occasionally send us videotapes of American TV shows. These were always a treat, because we never knew what we’d get; we’d just get a VCR tape in the mail containing six whole hours worth of unexpected entertainment. This was before the Web, of course; the only English-language TV we had in Tokyo was CNN International and several-years-old American programming on NHK. So these videotapes were a wonderful taste of home.

Among the shows we received on tape in the fall of 1988 were several installments of the 12-part miniseries “War and Remembrance.” We only got a few of the early episodes, but I’d always been interested in World War II, and I was completely drawn in, even by the graphic Holocaust scenes.

I decided to read the books. I managed to find a copy of “The Winds of War” in our high school library (I went to an American school), and I devoured all 900 pages. Shortly thereafter, I picked up “War and Remembrance” and began reading that one, but I only got about halfway through it; one day I put it down and never managed to pick it up again.

Occasionally I’d re-watch the limited videotapes we had of “War and Remembrance,” but I never saw any of the second half. Because I never read the second half of the book and never saw the second half of the miniseries, I never knew what became of these characters and how it ended. Did Natalie Jastrow, the American Jewish woman trapped in Europe with her Uncle Aaron and her baby, ever get out of Europe? Did they get caught by the Nazis? I never found out.

A couple of months ago, after reading a book about the Third Reich, I thought about “War and Remembrance” again. It turned out to be on DVD, so I made it my mission to finally watch the whole thing. I added all 12 discs to my Netflix queue. When it originally ran on TV, it was 30 hours long. Without commercials, it’s probably about 22 or 23 hours.

I just finished watching it tonight. Finally.

Wow. Just… wow. The last two episodes in particular.

I can’t believe it took me 18 years to get to the end.

It was totally worth it.

Five days until we go to London.

*********

I wish I were failing at something.

But in order to fail at something, you have to try something, and I haven’t tried lately.

Catching up on my friend Aaron’s blog, Aaron the poet, whose poetry is featured in magazines, who does poetry readings, who has won some poetry fellowships. I’m not interested in being a poet, but I do need to do more writing. I need to try and I’m not trying.

When I was out of work several months ago, I was thisclose to getting a writing job with a gay rights organization. I think I would have been hired. The money would probably have been much less than I’m making now, but maybe it would have led somewhere unpredictable. I told myself not to think about what-ifs, because happiness is all about attitude and outlook, not about your present situation.

I talked with my therapist last week about how my brother, who didn’t go to grad school and therefore has no student debt, is making lots more money than me, who went into debt for a law degree that I got without thinking about it carefully enough.

She asked me why I never went to work for a law firm. I told her that it’s not primarily the hours – although I don’t think I could deal with working until 10 pm at night or later. It’s the person you need to be in order to be a law firm lawyer. You need to like conflict. You need to be able to be a jerk. I don’t like conflict and I don’t like being a jerk. It’s the quality of being a law firm lawyer, not the quantity of the work involved, that really turns me off from it. (Okay, it’s a bit of both.)

She concluded that with my talents, with my qualities, there’s no reason I shouldn’t be making a good amount of money doing something I enjoy.

And it’s true that if I had more confidence in myself, and, moreover, if I were more willing to fail, I could be further along that road than I am right now. On the other hand, my attempt at writing an op-ed piece last summer went nowhere. I wrote it, got it published, blogged about it, and it caused a very minor blog controversy before it disappeared down a black hole. In retrospect, I wasn’t too happy with what I wrote. So after that, I gave up.

I’d love to be an essayist, get my stuff printed in magazines, on op-ed pages, online, and so forth. If only I didn’t, somewhere deep down, think I sucked as a writer.

This is all old hat to longtime readers of the blog, and nobody likes a whiner. I’m really writing these words more to write them than for you to read them.

But in short, I should try to fail.