How do you know?

I want something.
I don’t know what it is.
It has caused a bit of trouble, including almost getting kicked out of a car in the middle of the Mojave…
In 2006, I decided I could, with a little help from my friends, build a largish garage to replace the one that was falling down and end up with a studio of my own. I really wanted that studio.
The studio is not done yet. If I really wanted the studio, wouldn’t it have been finished by now, despite the tumultuous few years I’ve had? It is close, if I only had some money I could get the insulation and drywall done…
If I really wanted it done, wouldn’t I have the money to do it?
I have a digital video camera on my desk.
I thought I needed to have it because I had so many ideas for little movies and this new youtube thing sounded like it might catch on.
I don’t think it got 5 hours usage and it’s quite dusty.
The video editing software I bought with it won’t install on any current version of windows.
I could probably repeat this scenario a hundred times, and not just with material things. My education butted my wants up against reality several times. Even after I found myself in a respectable career I decided I could finish a degree that wasn’t pressing me to use it daily, but could just be an enjoyable aesthetic enhancement. I’m reasonably close to a couple degrees.
It turned out I really didn’t want that, either.
Or, at least that’s my assumption.
It could be that I just don’t want anything, but it seems like there is some sort of pressure there.
Not knowing what I want really causes problems when people are trying to decide where to eat. Some of my friends and my wife have mostly learned to deal with it. It’s not often that I’m craving anything specific, I just get hungry. And I don’t often run up against a place I don’t want to go to. When Debbie found out after ordering pizza that it would be my 5th pizza meal in a row a while back she got a little angry. “Why didn’t you tell me you’ve only had pizza since lunch yesterday?!” Well… For one, I like pizza, and two I didn’t have to decide what to eat. Left to my own devices I often had dinners of microwave popcorn and soda. Or more frequently several trips to the fridge to find the same nothing inside and then off to bed.
But I digress.
Some questions can bring me to a screeching halt. “What do you want for your birthday?” is quite a show stopper. “Do you want to go to a movie?” is an easy one, the answer is always yes. However, “What movie do you want to see?” is fairly problematic. That question is closely related to “What do you want to eat?” But for some reason, with a movie I often care.
Right now I don’t know if I want to finish this entry.
That’s not unusual, I often have 3-5 unpublished entries floating in limbo that eventually meet a bad end in the lightcycle arena, or something.
And it wouldn’t be the first time that I thought I wanted to write about this topic and ended up being wrong.
Maybe it will be the last.