I've been too busy with my midlife crisis to write much lately. I have also been watching far too many late night detectives solve grisly crimes in a matter of days or hours.
I find these shows comforting which seems odd; by rights it should feed my fears of under-achieving since most days it's all I can do to put clothes on, much less intuit the plan of a serial killer from the microexpressions on the face of a traumatized victim or the angle of hanging art in their apartment.
Last night I dreamt I was solving a murder which I dubbed "acellular" because all the components of a crime were there, but there was no body. It was all "in vitro". And no, *I* am not even sure how this biochemical analogy works.
My world of deadlines and minute personal drama lacks the urgency of solving murders and rescuing kidnap victims. But what it lacks in importance, it makes up for in the amount of fear and anxiety every small real life crisis generates.
I do not feel stressed, waiting suspensefully for the crime drama's protagonist's latest hunch to pan out. I know that despite the dark artsy dungeon and the look of sincere concern on the faces of the police on the scene, the girl will be found, 90% of the time still alive. I know the psychic's vision or the PI's intuition will be initially misleading but ultimately key to unraveling the mystery.
Meanwhile, I agonize over things like how to word that email, and live in constant fear that my experiments in the lab are not only not working but irrelevant. And 90% of the time, I am right. The email's recipient misunderstands me. The Western blot fails, the clone has a mutation, my brilliant idea was published ten years ago.
Real life is mundane but for all its unimportance, exhaustingly tense. Watching brutal crimes solved in a neat 42 minutes on the other hand... priceless.
Now if you'll excuse me, I've got another episode of The Killing cued up in Netflix.
