fodder.

I never used to think about my future. Not really. It was always, "Oh, I'll be a writer" and I would see myself with a pen and some paper (like anyone writes novels with pens and paper anymore) and think of a bunch of ideas I wanted to get across, and sew up the image with mild fantasies of success and peoples' identification. I wrote a lot more then, especially fiction, but rarely anything long, and even more rarely anything good.

Writing is the only thing that has ever seemed highly fulfilling to me. Apparently even feeding the starving is not is noble as arranged words and having them read. (I now feel differently, at least in that respect. That's all ego.)

I still would like to write, and still have dreams of writing fiction although the need or maybe the drive has been crushed like wine grapes from a seriously intense education. A high-caliber university education may leave you a more knowledgeable, and deeper, thinker, but if you get out with your self-esteem in tact and not in shreds, any hint of serious creativity is necessarily a result of your own fostering and protection. I have written, at this point, probably a hundred or so papers in college. And despite this, or perhaps due to it, my creativity has not been exercised too deeply. In fact, it has taken a hell of a beating. There is a reason my year ended on a decline in grades. I can't approach Microsoft Word anymore, and stick to the rhetorical structure, without some serious suffering. (Robert Pirsig may have been irritating in Zen and the Art, but he would be a relief to have as a professor.)

It is revelatory, and strange, that it is when I go home that I feel creatively refueled. This has happened on many occasions when I have gone home recently. I profess to hate the town, and yet some of the social experiences I've had (or come into contact with) there have been some of the most interesting and didactic. I closely know someone who is trying to deal with unutterable tragedy. I have a friend who has drastically changed religion and quickly married someone from a completely different culture. People from my high school are getting married and having babies (not often in that order), and some are already getting divorced. The coffee shop has its own mix of unique regulars; there's the transplanted, short African guy, raised English, who now teaches philosophy at a university nearby and will talk forever (he liked that I was reading The Brothers Karamazov, last time.) There's the family of Democrats and the intriguing diaspora of their attractive brood.

The strange sects of Christianity. The small town niches people fill. The blood-thirsty local politics and unbelievably intricate scandals. And surprising conversations that last hours with people you don't expect.

There is a reason I grew up romantic.