Everything's winding down.

Boston — at least my Boston — is on the academic calendar, and with finals in full swing, there's a kind of hush all over my little world.  The kid I've been seeing for the past six months, an adorable (if comically conservative) student at HBS, is off to San Francisco for an internship next week (I breathe a little sigh of relief). Even the garden — on account of the cold snap (OK, a cool snap, but it feels awfully cold for this time of year) — is in a kind of suspended animation. 

It's this time of year when I confront the fact — sometimes a secret horror in the depths of my heart — that I was simply not made to take things very seriously.  Of course, you do what you have to do, what life in a particular place and time requires of you, precisely so that you can occasionally find that sweet spot where you don't have to.  I guess that's what summer is for.

What I have never liked about adult life (and apparently I am not alone) is the pretense of seriousness all year round. Evolution is the long struggle to find a sense of humor about life, and the higher up the ladder you go the more absurd and comical things get.  Still, there are things, like the Census, you have to be serious about.  Things that simply have to be done.  Just hopefully not in the summertime.  And if you'd all filled out your forms like the government asked, we could all have had the summer off.

Whatever.  Lord knows, absurdity can easily spiral out of control, so that when the really nasty bits of life kick in, you're left stranded with only the echoes of ironic laughter in your ringing ears.  There are things in life that are serious.  Deadly serious.  On that you'll get no argument from me.  But they aren't, generally speaking, the things we take seriously in day-to-day life, or so it increasingly seems to me.  Realizing that, as most people my age know, is where the trouble begins. 

It's probably wiser to follow the herd on this one, though.  Laugh at the wrong moment and you'll incur the wrath of the masses.  I've always found theater and movie audiences mystifyingly fickle in this respect.  I have, on too many occasions to count, been the guy who bursts out laughing at the inappropriate moment, or found no one joining me in my enthusiastic applause.  That's awkward.

I have often wondered why some people can start that ripple of laughter or cheering, and other people garner only silent glares or get escorted out by security. There is nothing more hostile than a crowd of theater-goers who don't appreciate your sense of humor, let me tell you.  If I had a dime for each time I've had to scream "Don't tase me, bro!" I'd be a millionaire.

I'm in a reflective mood this morning, seeing as my small role in the rather grand enterprise of the US Census is over as of around 8:30 a.m., when I turn in my badge, along with all the little odds and ends of paperwork (and a huge bag of rubber bands) that have been cluttering up my kitchen table (I refused to do Census work at my writing desk) for the last two months.

It's really a remarkable endeavor when you think about.  And when you see how quaint and charmingly antiquated the whole behind-the-scenes operation is — run mostly by students, spinsters, out-of-work artists and (in the Boston South office at least) underemployed musicians — it is all the more remarkable, I can tell you. 

Yeah, there's plenty I could criticize — the training material is needlessly mind-boggling (for 2020 the government should hire whatever company does those furniture assembly packets for IKEA — what the manual needs is PICTURES!), the amount of paper waste is appalling (all-in-one envelope-forms, anyone?) — but the truth is, it gets done.  As for the rest, you could say we get the Census we deserve.

Seriously.