A quick vote, please.

Raise your hand if you didn’t watch Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Hands raised? Now take that hand and smack yourself in the head. It was a really good show, but it looks like because of people like you (tsk tsk tsk), it’s hasta la bye-bye for Sorkin’s latest.

I'm not much of a TV person. I have the same theory regarding new shows as I do drugs: they’re not especially helpful and I get on just fine without them, so why risk any addiction? But thanks to the advice of Sortarunnerguy, I gave this one a shot and really liked it. Matthew Perry, Bradley Whitford and Amanda Peet have great chemisty. Aaron Sorkin writes so beautifully Sorkin. Sure, it peaked early, it wandered as of late, but even mediocre Sorkin is good TV.

Now if Scrubs wraps this year, I’ll be back to take another vote. And you’ll get worse than a head smack if I lose my weekly dose of Braff.

A Date with your Family

Omigosh, this still slays me...

What I Know

I spent my early twenties regurgitating the happy-hour wisdom I once received: that while your twenties are spent thinking you know it all, thirty shows you that you don’t know anything. For some reason, I found comfort in that; it seemed a defense against any stupid decisions I'd make in my twenties, knowing that thirty would be the ultimate do-over. Now here I am, mere months from my thirtieth birthday, and only now do I really understand that little theory.

I’d like to create an addendum, though: not only does turning thirty make one realize that they don’t know what they’re doing, it makes one realize that no one knows what they’re doing. Even worse.

As ridiculous as it sounds, I unconsciously assumed there was a super-secret grown-up club and one day I would get a manual, learn the handshake and get the decoder ring. In the manual would be a long series of “if-then” statements dictating what to do in any given situation, from how to fix a refrigerator to when to leave a relationship; it would include the code to turn off bad habits like procrastination or messiness; it would include the secret to that smooth hair all women but me seem to have. As children, we assume adults have it together and a supreme order reigns. Now I look around thinking, you've got to be kididng, we're all just winging it.

So no manual exists; instead we’re flawed creatures making flawed decisions, creating a very messy world full of loose ends. It seems we’re very much the children we once were, only making much bigger decisions. As a kid, I imagined I'd live my adult life with absolute certainty, like all adults presumably did. Back then, when I felt overwhelmed I wrote little lists titled, “What I Know.” Underneath I'd list everything I was sure of, no matter how minor, and it made me feel better. So what do I list when I don’t know what I know?

Last night, my professor recalled a quote that the opposite of faith isn't doubt; the opposite of faith is certainty. I realized that the people I've grown to trust aren't the ones claiming to have the answers, but ones who can admit uncertainty yet decisively live their lives and pursue their truth anyway. Never did I think of that as faith, yet now I can't think of it as anything else.

Something trivial happened this week offering symbolic hope: the refrigerator broke. Jimmy and I have many talents, but home appliance repair is not among them. Although we didn’t have the super-secret grown-up manual to consult, we did have the fridge manual. With the help of that, Google and a good guess, we figured it out. We fixed a refrigerator. So on the eve of turning thirty, my new, pared-down “What I Know” list looks like this: I know I have a great partner in Jimmy; I know I have a brain, a heart, and good intentions; I know I'll never know it all. I’ll just rely on faith and figure the rest out as I go.