Home Again, Home Again

I'm in a blistering bad mood. Heading out today at 4pm.

Gonna go get some coffee.

It's just one of those days.

What I'm Working On:

Year of Wonders
____________________________________________

She painted on nonsdays, the day before worship, the day after sex, when her body was loose and her head was clear and she hadn’t yet purged herself of the week’s paltry sins. She liked the light on nonsdays, and she sat at her window in her robe, legs spread, watching the light spill over the city. The breeze was hot and heavy, humid as a den of lovers. The wind smelled of the sea. If she gazed over the blue tiles of the city, gazed just there, between the great towers of the church temple and the storage silos blocking the tail-end of the bay, she could just see the glint of the sea.

All she ever painted was the sea. The light on the sea, the city and the sea. She had moved out of her studio three times, trying to get a better view of the sea, but violence and poverty always sent her away from the core of the city and the beachfront tenant houses. She sat in her rented room and painted a dream of the sea cut through in a sliver of real light. When she slept, she dreamt of the sea.

But her dreams did not sell. Whoring kept her in rent and paint and sometimes bread. She liked her life. She loved her view of the sea. She did not want for lovers, just bread, for sometimes she felt she lived on the view and the dreams, and that was enough.

She was twenty-two, paint-smeared and starving.

When a man knocked at her door asking for a commission, she assumed it was a euphemism for sex, and told him he would have to wait until the day before nonsday. He laughed, and she offered him weak tea.

He sat with her on the floor of the studio and stared at the cluttered wall hung in a splash of canvases; a thousand shades of blue and violet and white and yellow, orange and gray, all dabbed and mixed and lovingly kissed so they could create this: the sea.

“I would like you to paint me,” he said. “As you paint the sea.”

“Impossible,” she said. “I dream of the sea.”

He leaned toward her. He was broad and angular, but not frightening. Men did not frighten her. Only violence. And men knew nothing of violence in the blue-tiled city. That was a woman’s vocation.

“I want you to dream of me,” he said.

He was not beautiful. But then, neither was she. It was not a city for the beautiful.


The Boxing Magicians of Faleen
________________________________________________________

For hours they stood on the edge of the road watching the cars while the dust settled in their hair and cicadas clung to the hems of their trousers. They had come from the boxing in Faleen and their eyes were black shadows and their clawed hands were tinged a faint violet, thick with swelling.

They were magicians, magnificent, resplendent in amber and topaz robes that covered their thick, powerful bodies. The black shadows of their eyes told nothing of where they’d been, why they waited, but you could always mark the boxing magicians of Faleen. They stood in the world like it was a transient thing, as temporary as a dawn wind. They stood as if they would outlast it.

Arran had seen them as soon as they alighted from the bus. They emerged from the cloud of roaches spewed from the bus’s exhaust and remained on the far side of the ditch, speaking low among themselves and watching the traffic coming back out from the city after afternoon prayer.

“You think we should offer them something, mother?” Arran asked the woman working beside him. He held the basket of roach eggs as she repaired the burst walls of the house, sealed the eggs over with mud and straw.

She was a big woman, fleshy in the hips and thighs, broad in the face and heavy in the bosom, her breasts so large that Arran once dreamed that he suffocated against them in her warm embrace. He had not known her long, only a season. His birth mother worked in government, somewhere in Punjai on the edge of the desert, along the Chenjan border where the worst of the skirmishes still blazed. He had been farmed out to families further inland from the fighting, to be raised up until he was old enough to go to war and kill the Chenjans that left his birth mother with no time for children. It wasn’t long off, he was nearly fourteen, and he’d seen the sixteen year old men marching off to war along the road after their graduation in Faleen. Not long. Not long at all.

This new mother spared a black look at the magicians, and spat a red pulp of kaj onto the dirt. “Offer them water. Magicians don’t go for liquor, this time of day. Go ask your sister to dole it out. And don’t linger. Magicians don’t like boys.”

Arran abandoned the basket and bolted around the back of the house to where his sister Jax was sparring with some local girls. They said that magicians could tell the future. They could tell you how you’d do in the war, how many Chenjans you would kill, how much honor you’d get back in Nasheen, how long you would be remembered.

“Jax, ma says to dole out some water,” he said.

Jax parried a blow from her partner with her left forearm, dipped away, pushed back from the sparring circle

“What?” she said. Sweat poured down her long, flat face. Her dark skin was covered over in a fine reddish dust. She had twisted her dark hair back into a knot of braids. All the girls did their hair that way, these days. He’d once begged to be allowed to grow his hair long, but every mother he’d had scolded him for it. What would a boy do with long hair? Get it caught by some Chenjan, likely.

“There’s magicians on the road!” he said, and immediately regretted it.

The other girls looked over at him. Jax’s sparring partner, and the three watching.

“What kind of magicians? From Faleen?” Jax said. She retrieved her long robe and rubbed her face with it.

Arran rocked back on his heels. “Mother wants water for them. She says I should –“

“We’ll take it out,” Jax said. She nodded to the girls, grinned. “You want your fortune told? I heard they give you good ones, if you bring them some bugs. Arran, give me your locust.”

“No,” Arran said. He’d caught the locust a month before, when a swarm came through and he and Jax and their mother had gone out to cover over the fields with organic netting. The locust had clung to the sleeve of his jacket, and when he saw it spread its amber and lavender wings, he caught it up in his hands and knew he had to keep it. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

“Don’t be a maggot,” Jax said. She shrugged into her robe, cut a look at her sparring partner, some lanky girl named Trinh who lived at a farm an hour’s walk away.

“It’s mine,” Arran said. “Just give me the water. Ma said –“

“Piss on what ma said. Let’s go see what these magicians are like,” Jax said. She nodded to the girls, and they bled past Arran and back around to the front of the house.

Arran hopped after them. “Don’t! Ma said I...”

Jax unlocked the well and pumped out some water into a bowl at the base of the house. She handed the bowl to Trinh.

“Shut up, Arran,” Jax said. “What do you think they’d have to say to you? Boys all end up the same, dead and buried in Chenja. Who gives a fuck about a boy’s future?”


Cheira-Cheira
______________________________________________


Cheira had named the ship after herself, and she still sat at mealtimes in the hub with lists of names at her elbows and a mask of liquor vapor in her hand. None of her crews had ever seen her eat. She did not keep her crews long (nameless bodies abandoned; deep space) because after a time they became dull and desiccated (and she left them on the crust of a colonial waste wearing thorns in their hair, clinging tightly to the lead rope of a solitary ox the color of old blood). She’d named the ship without any hint of irony. The idea that Cheira had any irony left was a riotous laugh even without knowing the ship's moniker, and her Second, Roman, amused himself often at the expense of her baptizmal humor.

Roman would come into Cheira’s quarters after the purging of every crew, his long face set in a dark, graven expression she had come to call winter, for it came as often as she remembered that season in her childhood.

His visage was his gift to her stagnation.

"Why don't we go on," he would say. "We can manage the cortex on our own. Engineers take up space. I can handle repairs. And the mercenaries… You're a better miss than any of them."

"There's the matter of the prisoner," she would say.

And he would throw up his broad, scarred hands and sigh and say, "Yes, there's the prisoner."

It was Cheira’s duty, her obsession, her vocation, to tread down the tongue of the spiraling stair from the cortex to the holding tank every six hours. She greeted the semblance of a body suspended in viscous green fluid with a blank stare and an unconscious moue she had seen Justice wear in propaganda posters during the war.

The body’s eyes were closed, its sex indeterminate, its face a morass of dark, thread-like tubes and wires. Most sessions, she merely came down and unlocked the feed cabinet, filled a clean syringe with dark fluid, and inserted it into the long black tube suctioned against the transparent cell. Sometimes, when the body absorbed the fluid, it would writhe and twist, lost in the ecstasy of fulfillment. Sometimes, it did not react at all, but remained still, unmoving (a mermaid trapped in ice).

After recording the convulsion - or lack of one - Cheira often went straight back into the cortex. But she had been known to linger, to sit at the flat, purring recording console that kept her charge in permanent stasis.

She had stopped wondering where the body had come from, or who it had been. Her interest was in pondering what it would become. She lost track of time (in these intimate reveries), often. After twelve hours of contemplation, she would hear Roman do a sensor sweep of the ship. He would find her alive and intact, and perhaps he would go back to playing screes or fucking one of the engineers or concocting a filmy liquor the tarry consistency of fuel oil. They were a pair of two, a crew of three, picking up floatsam and jetsom in the seams between the stars.

When the next filler contract arrived in Cheira’s room, Roman wanted a new crew. He was lonely, he said, after she left the last of his engineers on a paltry rock the color of foam.

She let Roman pick the crew, and he navigated them a path into Stile, a dusty ring of settlements on the edges of an asteroid belt circling a bloated, dying star. His brother worked in the scrap constellations around Stile, digging through old ships, piecing together their innards, selling them as pirated vessels imbued with the spirit of cheap colonial grit.

Cheira had not seen Roman's brother in a decade, when speaking of the war, of genocide, in terms outside the propagandic, was still new and unsettling and got them thrown out of establishments whose whores and buggers and creep cleaners called them void, diseased (marked for a dry asphyxiation in a torn cargo hull aboard a drifting ship in limitless space).

She did not greet Roman’s brother when he came aboard, but waited until he sought her out in the cortex. She stared out at the projection screen, the long loop of the asteroid belt. Bits of space debris bumped against the hull, bits of rocks and bodies, glass shards and scraps of metal so small they were worth less than the energy to gather them.

She heard him walk up the stair into the cortex. Heard him hesitate on the threshold.

"This your ship?" he said.

She had expected to feel nothing at his voice, but like the body in her hull, she was sometimes surprised at what was fed to her. She felt a sort of pain.

She swiveled in her chair. He did not take up the doorway as Roman did, but inhabited it in the loose way he inhabited all spaces, wrapping it around himself like a shroud , blurring the edges of his surrounds. He had once had the body of a dancer, but like all of them, he had atrophied, and though he was thin, it was a thinness borne of hunger and the loss of muscle. His eyes were black as Roman's, but their color was the only feature they shared. He was coffee black to Roman's sallow cream, slight in the hips and shoulders, delicate in the wrists and ankles, with the doe-like eyes of an oversized marionette.

He stepped into the cortex, and the ship hummed. She patted the console, and it quieted.

"You look terrible," he said.

"I was thinking the same of you," she said.

"Roman says you need an engineer."

"We don't, but we do."

"Cryptic, intriguing. I brought my work."

"Desecrate the hull and I'll have your sack."

"Haven't you had it?"

"It's been a long time."

"I have no doubt."

She regarded him. Something inside of her stirred, something dark, a gray gauze. "Where are the others?" she said.

His name was Luck.

#

Roman's tastes were predictable in their disparity. He brought up his foundlings to meet with her, the first: a pale, freckled girl of a pilot whose yellow hair was a startling burst of color. No one remembered the last time they'd seen yellow hair. The war, maybe.

The other was a mercenary, a tall, long-limbed man as dark as the girl was light. His head was shaved bald, and he wore a silver circlet above his ears; half of one ear was missing. He carried a charged gun at either hip, a shotgun across his back. He smelled of blood and metal.

"Do they have whole names?" Cheira asked Roman.

"Hanah Tohl," the little pilot said, holding out her little hand. It was a rude affectation picked up by a lot of the young, to touch when first meeting.

The other one, the mercenary, sneered at the open hand, said, "Dax Al-hamin. And in whose service are we?"

"Cheira's," Cheira said. "The ship and I."

"Cheira, is that a Kip name?" Hanah said. She had pulled her hand back in. She was smiling broadly. Her teeth were too white, not her own.

"It's nobody's but hers," Roman said. "And the ship's Cheira-Cheira. You'll say hello to her later."

Cheira sat with the new crew over supper. She unrolled her lists. She wrote Hanah Tohl and Dax Al-hamin.

Roman filled Cheira's vapor tank. He had not given her a plate.

"You ain't eating?" Hanah said.

Cheira merely raised her eyes. She put the mask to her face, inhaled.

"Cheira doesn't like questions," Roman said. "Don't ask them."

"You say we are in transport," Dax said. “I signed on for a job.”

Cheira pushed her vapor canister at Roman, and he stood and refilled it.
Roman said, "We have an indefinite transport contract with the Authority. We take on odd jobs to supplement that."

"What did you do before?" Hanah asked.

"There was nothing before," Roman said. He set Cheira's canister back at her elbow.

"So what happened to your crew?" Hanah asked.

Dax snorted.

Cheira looked sidelong at Roman. She picked at her teeth, heard someone behind her, glanced back.

Luck slipped in through the vibrating door, a tardy shadow.

“Food looks recycled,” Luck said.

“You expected something else?” Cheira said levelly.

“There’s no before, and no crews,” Roman said, clearing up the obnoxious pilot’s question. “We take on crews only as we need them. We’re being asked to deliver cargo to some Authority swanks. We’re taking you all on to assist with pickup and transport.”

“Where we going?” Dax asked.

“Tutara,” Roman said.

Dax leaned back in his chair, crossed his big arms. “They still have cargo on Tutara?”

“We’ll find out,” Roman said.

“Cargo? What sort of cargo?” Hanah asked.

Dax fixed a black stare on her. “Bodies,” he said.

“Whose bodies?” Hanah said. She fiddled with her liquor mask. Cheira wondered if Roman had watered it down to crew rations yet. Best not get them used to excess.

“Abandoned colonists,” Roman said. “The ones who took the slow boat to the outer systems. Bad timing on their part, and bad tech.”

“We invented faster drives while they slept,” Luck said.

Cheira frowned at him. Luck had never invented anything of the sort.

“And when they arrived,” Roman continued, “the terras they’d intended to settle were already colonized by faster ships run by their great-grandchildren. Colonizers who set down first get first rights, so extraneous cargo was diverted to Tutara.”

“Isn’t that illegal?” Hanah said.

“What, salvaging?” Roman said.

Cheira wondered if Hanah had ever sold her womb. It was practically the same thing. Just body parts. Dumb tender kid. Where had Roman dredged up this one?

She finished another canister of liquor and shook it. It was time to feed the prisoner.

She pushed back from the table.

Roman caught her eye. “You’ll excuse Cheira. She has an engagement. I’ll finish the briefing.”

Bodies in space (It was always an interesting ride).
_______________________________________________________

$1.94

The amount of money I currently have in my checking account until I get paid on Friday, just in time for Wiscon.

Oh, joy.

And also: first monthly bleeding with an IUD - ha ahaha oh, what joy, what fun for everyone! With all this blood, I could throw a party, or take part in a Satanic ritual. Blood rites, indeed.

Straight women really get screwed on this whole contraception deal. I'm told it'll be 1-3 months before I even out. It beats depression, but it sure as hell knocks ya flat the first month.

I Don't Worship Your God!

(via Nicky)

Friday Beer Blogging

Hey, c'mon, you know it's beer he's drinking!!



Though a proper pirate would be partaking of rum. The pirate's drink of choice.



This one, however, looks rather gross.

And am I the only one whose mind went right to the gutter with this one?

It's been a mind-numbing number cruncher of a week.

Happy Friday. Happy drinking! Happy pirating!

Here's Another Exciting Installment of: I Want to Live in Big Brother America!!

The best and worst part about democracy? Not only does everybody get to say whatever they want, which is great, but they get to pretend that what they want and believe should legally be what everybody else wants and believes.

Of course, totalitarian states aren't much different, except for that first part. It's just a step to right.

A recent caller to my radio program, Linda, supports the tax (on fast food).

Linda: I'm hoping this tax will motivate people, get them to do their own cooking.

Larry: Why?

Linda: There are too many fat people -- they're all going to fast-food places. . . . I'm so glad they're doing this. . . . Because they're fat, fat, fat. They're eating the wrong food. Stay home, do your own good cooking.

Larry: Do you engage in any kind of conduct that other people might condemn, Linda? Do you drink?

Linda: No . . .

Larry: Do you watch TV?

Linda: Yes, and I watch those terrible commercials from fast-food places, and I get angry. They should tax those commercials, too.

Larry: Maybe they ought to tax you for watching so much television. Why don't you get up and exercise more?

Linda: People have no restraint. They need to be restrained.

Larry: You think the job of the legislature is to restrain them by taxing their behavior?

Linda: They're fat. They're unhealthy, they have diabetes, they have high blood pressure, and they're at the fast-food place -- and their children watch them, and then the children go there, too. It's a disgrace! Cook, cook, cook.

Larry: What do you do when they cook junk . . . when they cook fried foods?

Linda: No, no. They have to cook healthy food.

Larry: How are you going to ensure that? This tax makes the price go up, and more people are cooking at home. How do you guarantee they won't cook the same crap they went out to buy before?

Linda: If we have enough talk about healthy food, someday people will realize they have to cook healthy foods.

Larry: Why don't you contribute to a fund for television Public Service Announcements, advising people what they should do? Why are you going to legislators to tax other people's behavior that you don't like? Unbelievable.

Linda: Why are the Oriental people and European people much healthier than the American people? The American people are obese! . . . I'm horrified by how many obese people there are.

Larry: What about Asians who are here? . . . Are they overweight?

Linda: Not as much as American people.

Larry: Well, how do you suppose they manage not to walk into a restaurant and get fat? And whatever they're doing, why can't everybody else do it, too?

Linda: That food is bad. Your mother can tell you that.

Larry: Should we tax people who order fried chicken at restaurants?

Linda: Why, that's bad, too! Yes, yes, all that bad food should be stopped. . . .

Larry: So tax hikes for health are OK.

Linda: Something has to be done. It's a start.

Larry: Why are you concerned about how fat people are?

Linda: People end up in the hospital, and we're paying for their health problems. Not only that, but even to look at them! They're disgusting to look at! Every time I come back from the store or walk around, I come back furious, seeing how fat they are!

Larry: I bet if you see a fat person smoking a cigarette, you're ready to have a heart attack, aren't you?

Linda: No, cigarettes don't bother me. I'm not a smoker, but it doesn't bother me as much as looking at an obese person. I mean, don't they have mirrors? Don't they look in the mirror and go, "Oh my God, I have to do something about this weight"?

Friday Quotes

"Obscure references, pretentious phrases and ostentatious vocabulary will not be mistaken for eloquence."

"For a while I've been trying to find my passion," Jonah said. "But I haven't been passionately trying to find my passion."

"The separation of church and state was an idea created by the devil to keep good Christian people from ruling this great land."
- Justin Crowe, Carnivale

Another Study You Won't Hear About Around Valentine's Day

Later Moms, Longer Lives

Waiting to have children may add years to a woman’s life, says Jenni Pettay of the University of Turku in Finland. The evolutionary biologist analyzed 5,000 birth records from four generations of 17th- and 18th-century Finns and found that women who waited the longest before having their first child were statistically more likely to live longer. The delay in childbirth seems to be inherited: Late mothers’ daughters also tended to become late mothers themselves. (Late was defined as after 30.)

Previous research has suggested that women who delay having children live longer. But none of these studies was able to determine if the longevity was due to cultural factors, such as a higher socioeconomic class or better living conditions. Pettay got around those issues by studying women from a homogeneous population who did not have access to contraception or advanced medical care.

Still, Pettay says, it’s culture, not genes, that explains why Westerners delay parenthood: “In modern society there tends to be a low number of offspring per couple, so natural selection isn’t at work. But this study does suggest there may be benefits to later motherhood that evolved to counteract the decrease in total fertility years, such as living longer to provide care to grandchildren.”

—Jocelyn Selim

Workaday, Workadoo

Every morning, this goddamn printer jams. We have a new coffee maker, but no new printer.

Priorities, afterall.

Just Keep Writing

Eventually, something will make sense.

Well, Then

I need to start drinking decaf.

Sweet

They've got a Carnivale store.

Terribly sexy. I'm nearly halfway through the second season. It's totally rocking the house.

Good Morning, Chiklits

Good morning to all you 12 readers who've managed to keep with me through the last few months.

Some days, I'm amazed I'm still here.

I enjoyed a good, long weekend with B, managed to snatch an hour or two with Jenn for coffee before she headed out again. I continue to work on various projects - and if not progressing chapter by chapter - they're percolating well and being notated, which is a big step in the right direction. I also seem to be very able to start things (I've got a couple great NEW short story beginnings staring at me), but have my usual trouble coming up with actual plots. Still need to work on that.

Slow day at work today, so good writing will be done, things accomplished, and all that jazz.

That's the plan, anyway.

Boy Writers. So Cute.

“Well, the best way [to improve your female characters] is to have relationships with a lot of different women. What's the best way to do that? It's to pick up whores.”

- William Vollman

Shit, I knew there was something I was supposed to be doing to be a better writer! I need to pick up more whores!!

(thanks, Julian)

Busy, Busy

Work, life, very busy. Good weekend ahead. Yay.

Good Morning, Chiklits

That's about all I've got left this morning.

Cheers.

Office Shinanigans

We have a new coffee maker in the office. Just got it hooked up.

You should see the stir it's making. Oh, what dull workday lives we have!

The cappucino is apparently pretty good... I better go make sure.

Workaday, workadoo.

Sometimes, When You're Feeling Down, You Just Need to Listen to Yourself.

Was moving through the archives, and found this little piece about what I learned in 2004.

You know, sometimes, I just need to listen to my own advice:

Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2004:

Here's this year's: there are often long stretches of downtime on the road to where you're going. You know, those long stretches of highway between New York and LA, or the shitty stretches of nowheresville between Seattle and Chicago - but those distances, those driving times, are neccessary to get to where you need to go.

2004 has been a shitty stretch of midwestern highway, with road stops along the way like Toledo's Tallest Tree & Billy Bob's Lint Museum, intercut by signposts that say stuff like "Civilization: 2000 miles," and the car has mostly run pretty good, but it overheated once (luckily, I keep a couple gallons of water in the back), and got a couple of flats (ever since my roadtrip to Skagway, I keep two spares in the trunk), and there was the odd problem with something hanging off the engine that was resolved by tying a couple of choice parts back together with a shoelace before I got to stop off at the shop and get it fixed proper, and I didn't stop for any hitchhikers along the way, but I felt bad about it. I'm now consulting a really confusing map somewhere in the Salt Flats of Utah on my way to the ocean, and yea, I'm stronger and more confident, and I'm getting better rejection slips, but I can't see the ocean yet, likely because I'm just not ready to see it yet. Likely because I need to pick up a few hitchhikers and learn how to play the harmonica and trade in the car for a motorcycle, but I switched from fast-food to granola bars sometime back, and I've got better shoes and a good pair of sunglasses, and there's nothing so cool as arriving at the seashore on a sweet-ass motorcycle, wearing a floppy newsboy cap as my striped scarf streams behind me, and maybe that's the whole point.

There's a place I want to be. This is the road I'm taking to get there.

I don't mind that it's a long road. It just means I'll be a more interesting person by the time I get there.

Amen to that.

Thoughts and Wanderings

Now that the gray fog of illness is lifting, and now that I appear to be fighting off the last of my sicknesses, it's time to take stock of this life, and what the hell I'm doing with it.

The June date for taking the LSAT is full, which is actually a good thing, cause I haven't had time to study, and I'm still not sure I'm really gung-ho about the idea of law school - mainly because it'll mean I've got to commit to one place for 3 years and take out a huge amount of money. It means going back to being a *really* poor student. And though I miss the freedom of student life, and learning new things, taking a money hit for three years depresses the hell out of me.

The issue then becomes: well, shit, woman, what do you want to do with your life? Certainly, I'm writing books and short stories, and someday I'd like to make a living doing it, but that day isn't today, and in the mean time, I'd hate to think I was wasting my potential and not making full use of the years I've got. I'm youngish, nearly in great health, and can (mostly) pay my bills. So what's next? What do I want? What's my next challenge?

That's how I keep my mind going, how I keep from feeling like I'm atrophying. I need new places, new challenges.

I have a couple of options, and I've been mulling them all over for some time, to the point where, I think, Jenn and B are sick of hearing them. But I'm going to mull them over again.

Jenn and her SO will be moving in together after next year (likely), and the SO doesn't particularly want me in on this get-together, which is understandable, so if I do stay in Chicago, I'm on my own. This means that in order to live in something other than a studio apartment, I'll need to have a better-paying job by next year. At least 45-55K.

B is also very keen on me moving to NY for a year while he finishes up school - and I think living in NY for a year would be really cool. While I'm flying up there on the off-weekends, I can always extend the trip for job interviews. Living would be tight (money and spacewise), but I could do it for a year, and it would give me a new city to explore, a move to negotiate; a challenge, which is what I'm looking for.

There's also the opportunity with a gaming company one of my writing buddies is currently at. They're hiring, but they're also in Canada, and about an 8-hour plane flight from NYC, where B is. And basically, an 8-hour-flight is a make-or-break for our fledgeling relationship, or, to paraphrase B, "I think that's a great opportunity, and if you really want to do that, I'll totally support you as a friend. But I can't maintain a relationship where we see each other one weekend a month if 16 hours of that weekend are taken up with flying time."

He's right, of course. If I applied for, got, and took that job, I'd effectively end my relationship with B, and I'm not willing to do that. He's still got a year of school, so there's no compromise on that for at least a year.

It all comes down to what makes me feel the most fulfilled, and I don't know what that is right now. Writing books at a beach house on the Oregon Coast would certainly make me feel fulfilled, but I'm not at that point in my life yet. So how do I fill up the years between now and then?

The answer, for me, is about being better. I want to be better. Go back to school for another Master's degree? Or settle for taking French classes at Truman College? Could I "settle" for that? Would I feel like I was progressing? What if instead of academic pursuits, I focused on the physical stuff, really started taking boxing and martial arts seriously? Would I feel that that was a great enough challenge for me? (and oh boy, it would be a big challenge, to focus on actually getting *good* at something physical).

At what point can I step back and say that those social measures of achievements: school degrees et. al. aren't neccessary for me to feel like I'm "accomplishing" something?

Education was and is very important in my family, and it's how we measure success, that and money, of course, but education is considered almost *more* respectable than money. I'm sure I'm carrying around some of that when looking at my life. Am I done with formal school? Can't I just take up painting and collect books and have a nice place and feel as if I'm accomplishing something? At what point can I just say, "This is enough for me"?

I don't know. I don't think I'll ever be able to say it's "enough," but I'd like to be able to say I have enough academic degrees. Because those damn things are fucking expensive. I've got to find something I find fulfilling. I don't want to feel like I'm stagnating, like I'm merely existing.

I've got to find focus: the kind that comes with a "reward" at the end. Problem is, most things don't have a golden key at the end unless you give yourself one.

It's crises time, when nothing feels like it's moving forward, and you just want to kick yourself in the ass cause life just seems too damn comfortable.

Maybe I just need to spend a couple weeks abroad, and get this travel bug out of my system. I feel like I need to move.

Good Morning, Chiklits

At some point, I'll become a good worker and get here on time.

Just not today.

Whatever happened to my work ethic?

Ah, yes, that's right: I became old and cynical.