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Every winter, for the last three or four years, I’ve pined for somewhere else to live — somewhere warmer, somewhere different, somewhere where I could feel more comfortable and certain about my decision to stay. I’ve never felt certain about State College, Pennsylvania, and for all its familiarity (and for all that I genuinely like about this town) it has never truly felt like home. And yet every spring, as windows slide open and heavy coats are swapped for shortsleeved shirts, I start looking for reasons to stay. I start to think that maybe it’s just the cold and the snow that I dislike, and just sunlight and warm weather that I crave. Driving around with the sunroof open in sixty-to-seventy degree, bright sunshine weather can make just about anywhere seem like paradise, even if only temporarily.

And, frankly, I don’t know where else I might be tempted to go. Friends who have left, and even some of those who have stayed behind, wonder what I see in this town and suggest that I go somewhere else, that I can go anywhere my heart desires. But that’s just the thing: I don’t want unlimited options. I want clear choices, a reason for choosing here or somewhere else, even if in hindsight that reason proves to be wrong and I regret the decision. My job, for reasons I won’t get into here — I assume that those who care already know — isn’t enough to keep me here, but the pay is decent, and I am in a good position from which to apply for other jobs. And while I don’t have large circle of friends, more than a few of them are still here. Maybe it’s just the newly spring-like weather, maybe it’s just fear of leaving the familiar, but I’m seriously thinking about not moving after all.

Thanks to the all-consuming Matt, I now find myself playing this far more than is probably healthy for me. It’s like a really goofy, cartoon Lego version of Myst — which I guess is what I really want to be playing. Apparently, there’s a collection of all three Myst games due some time at the end of the month. I do have a birthday in a couple of weeks…and it is only forty dollars…but probably the last thing I need right now is an excuse to spend more time in front of my computer. In the three weeks since I first started The Talisman, I’ve read a pitiful total of about sixty pages. I need to start rectifying that. And I need to start writing more on my own.

Tom Tomorrow writes:

So, let’s talk about evil for a second. The president has used the term so often and so clumsily that it has begun to lose meaning, become part of the background noise of the culture, easily tuned out. And that’s unfortunate, because it was an act of evil. This is what the patriotically correct crowd doesn’t understand: you can try to understand how such a thing could have happened, what factors could drive men to such extremes–and still consider their acts evil, beyond redemption. No rational person would be so foolish as to pretend that the Holocaust was not evil, and yet no one would argue that the Nazi party simply sprang into being fully formed, unaffected by historical context.

Caitlin R. Kiernan writes:

I’d be willing to suppose that at least 50% of good writing is just knowing when the hell to shut up.

And me? I write…well, nothing really. Maybe it’s that I’m too tired, or too hungry, or too cold — or maybe it’s because I think that everything I write has to be perfect, exactly the right words in exactly the right order, and I worry about what I’m going to say, or how I’m going to say it, when really I should just be getting words on paper or screen and worrying about revising them later. I agonize over words and phrases, struggle with beginnings…and so I rarely get past them. Even when there are ideas in my head — and there are many — stories seem to stall somewhere in their first few sentences because I’m unwilling to accept them as works in progress. I’m unwilling to accept the initial problems in my prose. I never want to leave in something and move on if it isn’t quite as good as I think it could be. But I need to allow myself the freedom to fail, the freedom to fall flat on my face, to write something that isn’t perfect, to just write.

We’ll see how I feel after lunch.