Whoa. Check out Ethan Hawke! My main man! It’s funny the paths life can take sometimes, you know? When I moved to New York City almost seven years ago, I thought to myself, Well, this is it. I’m done. I am going to die here, in the greatest city on Earth. I love it here and nothing will ever make me want to leave. And then, when I moved away from New York City this past fall I realized, oh, wait, no, you really never know what is going to happen next. It is impossible to predict what you are going to want in three years from now, much less five or ten or one hundred or one thousand. (Oh, P.S. the other thing I realized is that thinking I was going to die in New York was crazy because I am never going to die.) There was an interesting article in the New York TImes last month about this particular effect. Basically, we are currently the accumulation of all of our experiences and desires and interests and whatever, and we recognize that those have changed over time, but that is where our imagination stops, and most people (falsely) expect that they will continue to just be the same person in the future, even though they will continue to be lots of different people over their lifetimes, just as they have been so far. So let’s all just enjoy what we have right now, and not even spend too much energy worrying about what we think we are going to wish we had later. What I’m trying to say is that Ethan Hawke probably never even saw this coming, but now here he is, and he’s making the most of it. One day you’re a flannel-wearing, late-90s heartthrob, the next day you are a transsexual Nazi hunter or whatever that Sean Penn movie that turned out to look surprisingly good was about. And the best part is, Ethan looks great doing it. Just bein’ Ethan! (I call him Ethan now.) High fives to all our former, current, and future selves!

Click through to enlarge. (Image via Celebitchy.)