It's awfully quiet around here these past couple days, what with me having been in Malibu, then being sick this afternoon...

I feel like I'm on the cusp of something I know not what. I know that sounds completely ambiguous, but frankly I'm feeling a little lost at the moment, standing on damp grass in a dense fog, with a rope around my waist with a dozen others tied to it, spreading from me into the fog like spokes on a ghostly wheel, some slack, some taut, pulling me, the spectral hub, this way and that. My scant traction between bare feet and green blades lets me exert what little leverage I control to contest the pull of a single rope, a single external vector on my current life, but only at the cost of falling to the whim of all the others.

The inability to discriminate, choosing only one axis among many upon which to actualize my will, I'm tossed around, paralyzed, on a journey not entirely of my own making, yet in the end one for which I alone am answerable, as I have the capability to act on it, if only in piecemeal and often counterproductive ways.

Ahh grad school in a distant land: How little I appreciated your power for generating novel experiences in a person who thought he had everything pretty well figured out...