Christopher Nolan is making another delightfully creepy movie with a cast of the usual suspects.

It's been a while since I've done this. But here goes:

Do you ever stop and look at your life and say to yourself: "Absolutely nothing has turned out the way I planned." Not that anything's going particularly badly, it just seems like this totally alien vista compared with the future you had imagined for yourself at earlier points in your life.

Let's start right back at the beginning. When I was a young child, I was certain that I would grow up to be a scientist. Quite early on, I lived under the naive assumption that there were such people as "inventors" who just sort of sat around inventing things. I wasn't aware that most inventors invent one thing that they're remembered for, or that they're just amateur engineers who happen to serendipitously come across some practical solution that aids them in their day to day lives. Nor was I conscious of the fact that coming up with enough ideas in a regular enough stream to finance one's lifestyle, not to speak of one's research, might prove difficult.

For my later childhood and much of my adolescence, I figured that I'd end up in the sciences somewhere, perhaps computers. But as time went on I realized that computer science is a study that necessitates an aptitude for mathematics. I barely passed Math 11, I struggled to get a C+ in Math 12 (which I was told was the bare minimum for acceptance in computer sciences), and then I decided that I really didn't want to have any sort of cozy relationship with cold, abstract numbers for the remainder of my existence.

So my post-secondary life saw me dive headfirst into music, and all of a sudden I wasn't a scientist first anymore, I was an artist. It's quite a switch, let me tell you. From a trombone player I because a composer. I lived in a universe saturated with sound. There were times when I just craved silence because I was so saturated with music all the time.

Then came the year I knew I was absolutely sick of the bullshit. When you make art, there will always be someone around to question its validity. There will always be some grand argument about the nature of artistic expression or technique or artistic politicking of some kind that will be brought to bear on your meek and desperate attempt to express yourself. After six years studying music at the post-secondary level, I my love for writing music in the classical tradition was broken by moldy old professors in the moldy old offices of a moldy old institution with no real grasp of cultural reality. Two and a half years passed before I wrote anything again.

Now, I'm working at an office. I work with people who manage public companies, and securities lawyers, and I talk about business. I've been doing this for more than three years now. I write popular music with Jeff and will live with roommates for much of the foreseeable future. Really, I'm somewhere that I never thought I'd be at this age.

Then all of a sudden, one day, you remember yourself. You had all these ideas about what you'd be and none of them happened the way you'd expected. Is that bad? If I met my former self as I was five or six years ago and told me how I turned out, would I be happy, or disappointed, or just surprised?

They say that the only certainty in life is uncertainty. But if that's the case, how do you plan for anything? When my friends get depressed or have problems I tell them to change their life so that they're happy in the present. But what if you can't be happy in the present because of poor planning you executed in the past? I'm happy now, but will I be happy with myself for the life I lived when I'm old and gray?

There's no way to tell. As an added bonus, I could always be hit by a bus tomorrow and that would sort of render all my careful planning and expectations useless.

So life is uncertain, and there's not a lot you can ask from it. I know I'll be fairly happy doing one of any number of different things, so for the time being I'll just go with the flow. One thing is for sure, though, I know I want someone to share my life with. That's the one thing I won't do without.

I hope it stays that way.