Self- discovery and awareness in the middle of January. I have struggled to like January a great deal, and luckily it is almost over. You aren't entirely aware of it how it is the pole in the middle of the road given the whole year. The next thing you have to look forward to in the way of holidays is Valentine's Day, which presuming you are in love with someone, can only be truly enjoyed on condition. I guess an argument could be made that Christmas can only be celebrated on condition as well, that condition meaning that you are Judeo-Christian in heritage but the other holiday which follows from VAlentine's Day is of course, St. Patrick's Day... presumably you don't have to be Irish to really enjoy it, but I've never found that to be entirely the case...I mostly want to be safe and away from bar-crawlers. Truly, I like those moments where you find cause to celbrate regardless of the fact that there is no holiday surrounding it... celebrating life, celebrating again that you figured out that you are in love with the person you live with again, celebrate the fact that you have legs and can walk upright. Celebrate the fact that you have blood punding through your heart. Celebrate trust.

Today we talked about the dues and fees for membership. The fee for coming into a room, telling complete strangers about where you're at. where you're trying to go, how you feel and that it somehow pulls your life together into a narrative which suddenly makes sense a little more than it used to. The fee being the thousands of dollars you pour down the drain, the relationships, the brain cells, etc. You didn't notice paying them and didn't , couldn't predict where it was going to wind you up. And you didn't believe that it was going to amount to much. What you would come to endure. How you would manage to survive yourself. How you begin to bask in laughter. That you would begin to create laughter. That you would begin to find joy again, even on days when the wind whips hard because suddenly you have discovered that people affect you in a profound way, sometimes by their intimacy, sometimes by their aloofness, their objectivity, but they can pentrate your being and you learn to live again. You know long have the strings of a puppet, it's just coming to you naturally, as if you knew it all along, someone just needed to start the fire, to light the spark.

I remember driving a long distance between here and somewhere else and thinking about the course my life could take, what I could legitimately be DOing with myself. I looked at being behind a computer desk for the next however many years, knowing that my true role was to consult. To put down the fence of a human trying to get through the next forty hours of submission to the will of his company. And realized that God gave me brains to use for a reason. He didn't care how I used them, just so long as I applied them toward the good, and just so long as I didn't fully expect to keep various talents to myself, that was how it was supposed to go down... I still like to think about this because I think I might still have yet to find the exact groove into which I can fit myself in terms of vocation... the fact that I like to consult, to teach, to help others question... something along those lines, exploiting my own knowledge that I love to get people to talk about themselves, to identify that they know what they think they know... an admitted Platonist I guess. So I have to imagine that i will need to continue to explore that love, that comfort.