See? I'm Not Always Morbid and Filled With Angst.

I love this place. I love the people whose skill tacitly compels me to improve. I love my art, my craft. I'm not sure I'm any good at it. I don't really care. I'm never more exuberant than when I get it right. I'm never more ashamed than when I am presenting work I know to be sub-par. I have seen moments of beauty that continue to inspire me years after I experience them. It is a gut-wrenching, light-bringing, soul-crushing, heart-mending, eye-opening endeavor.

And I love it.

At Sixes and Sevens

I am a walking contradiction, a hodgepodge of hobbies and interests, an intersection of sensibilities and aesthetics. I refuse to be confined to a genre, to be labeled, to be pigeonholed. Perhaps I am complex because I am restless, or inconstant, or easily distracted. Hopefully I am simply astounded by the beauty waiting to be uncovered in the diverse corners of human potential.

Should we take Jerry Jeff's advice and taste every single grape on the vine? I'm not a hedonist, but I do see great value in a diversity of experience and the willingness to venture beyond the pale.

Is all that can be known worth knowing? My life is a series of experiments designed to settle the issue once and for all.

Oooo, a Metamorphosis! Kafka and Ovid Would Be So Proud!

I don't make New Year's resolutions. I know myself too well to believe that the prospect of another year of life will serve as sufficient encouragement to achieve my life goals. If I'm going to change, I know full well it must be motivated by dissatisfaction with my circumstances as manifested in a single, particularly provocative event or series of events. However, in the past few months I have decided that certain promises I have made to myself must finally be fulfilled. To wit: I asked for and received an accordion for Christmas and have so far been quite diligent about practicing daily. I started an intense cardio program five times a week that I plan to continue the rest of the semester. I am also shining a painful but life-giving light on the cruel, selfish places in my soul and excising them, slowly but surely. How much pride and satisfaction it has given me to improve myself mind, body, and soul in significant, quantifiable ways!

Coincidentally, the New Year just rolled around, so I suppose those among you who wish to do so may consider these self-improvement initiatives New Year's resolutions. I see them more as long-overdue payment on post-dated checks transferring funds from a heretofore insufficient fund of inspiration and discipline into a once-dwindling reserve of recent personal change for the better. Six of one, half-dozen of the other.

You Know What Really Grinds My Gears?

I remembered today how much it bugs me when people use two exclamation marks at the end of a sentence. For some reason I feel the only reasonable options are a) one b) three or c) a ludicrous amount, each indicating a successively higher degree of emphasis. An example would be as follows:

• We're having a baby! (Usual case; typical degree of excitement)
• We're having a baby!!! (A successful result of months of fertility treatments)
• WE'RE HAVING A BABY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (Tweet posted by the last surviving human couple in a post-apocalyptic future)

Yet another unreasonable pet peeve of mine, I suppose.

Mixed Messages

Today I had lunch with my 90-year-old grandmother at her assisted living home and took the winding drive through the country to visit Camp Champions. These two experiences, coming one after the other as they did, combined to produce a confusing philosophical haze that has settled on me all afternoon and evening. I have been faced with my own mortality and gripped with an intense fear of mental degradation while simultaneously celebrating my own vitality and relishing the peculiar joie de vivre that washes over me from time to time when I'm especially content with where I am and where I'm headed. At times like these I am indecisive, hesitant, perhaps tortured. Speaking generally, I don't know whether to lament that which has been lost or to exalt the wonders that are surely to come. I feel confident that each response is appropriate for different periods of our lives (The Birds and Ecclesiastes would agree). The trouble comes when one feels the urge to participate in both.