So I have two lists in my pocket. The first is a list of reminders of things I want to blog about. The second is a list of pictures to take from Chatterwaul's Collectivo project, where each participant takes 10 pictures on a theme. This one's theme is 'The Daily Routine' and the individual pictures are things like '1. The first thing you see when you wake up' and '5. Something that requires your daily attention'. I've finished taking most of the pictures, and I'll point to them when they get posted to the site.

Two of the instructed pictures are giving me trouble though: '8. Your most loathsome daily activity' and '9. The thing you look forward to most each day.' I've been thinking about it for three days, and I can't find anything particularly loathsome that happens daily. I mean, how loathsome is taking out contact lenses really? Similarly, I'm having trouble finding the thing I look forward to each day. Again, how much can you look forward to a Chai? And even then, I already took a picture of that ritual for '3. A food or beverage you consume on a daily basis.'

I hadn't realized how low-contrast my life seems to be getting.

I'm living in the middle.

...

In my love life, that thing that keeps happening outside of fury.com's view, there's a coffer full of untold stories and those still unfolding. I'm neither saint nor satyr, looking for love, but unable to give myself up to it. I have the opportunity for love and commitment, or I could be sated with my friendships, but my own feelings, desires, and emotions are constantly conflicted, to my own detriment and sorrow and that of some of those who touch my life.

I'm living in the middle.

...

Tomorrow is the one year anniversary of my application deadline to Carnegie Mellon's graduate HCI program. Tomorrow, hundreds of eager hopefuls have to have their own applications postmarked. Last March, with a job offer from Yahoo in one hand and an acceptance from CMU in the other, I chose to defer grad school for a year. I told my manager of my intent to get my Masters degree the following year, and he said that after a year at Yahoo, I wouldn't want to leave.

In two months today's applicants get their thin-lipped letters of rejection or grinning packets of admission. I'll be getting a joyous packet, one year deferred, and I'll find myself weighing the same choices, options, and futures, albeit with a year's more perspective. The needle keeps wavering, and right now it's at the balancing point.

On one hand, I love Yahoo. The people there are the most capable I've ever had the pleasure of working with, and I feel that I get to exert my capabilities more and to more meaningful ends than ever before. Even more telling, in my CMU app statement of purpose, I talked about how I want to be able to design interaction models that will be used by millions, eventually being emulated by competitors, and finally being accepted as simply 'the way things work.' I'm incredibly lucky to have that opportunity, designing Yahoo! Messenger, and I'd be a fool to leave it.

On the other hand, CMU's HCII program is the best in the world. Coming from a university of 30,000 people, and a high school of 3,300, going to a graduate program of 40 people, on a campus with one eighth the population of UC Berkeley, I'd love an educational experience that doesn't involve feeling like a number. In short, I feel like I got an invitation to Hogwarts, and the Dursleys are inside a corner of my brain, crying things like "too much money!" "Pittsburgh? For a full year?" and "The perfect job isn't good enough for you?"

If I choose to go, I hope to continue at Yahoo when I finish in 12 months. There will be packing, storage, the sharing of furniture and furnishings with friends ("Will you take my big TV, oh please?"), and the slow but steady purge of unneeded junk, papers, etc. from my life, in preparation for one carful of stuff on a cross-country sojourn to a new, brief, life. If I choose to stay, I've decided that I need to move. (More on that later. I'm writing it on the list of things to blog about now.)

Gah. I just need more information, and I'll make sure I gather it in the next couple months, both about Yahoo and CMU. But for now, and for the next several months --

I'm living in the middle.