Some things I'm usually thinking about:

Limitlessnesses—

Of human suffering, for one.

We were still on Oahu when we heard about the tsunami. It was too easy to imagine the vulnerability of having no where to go.

Later I noticed some small comfort in the indiscriminate toll, and I took it to mean that I have overburdened myself with my own survival, as if I have much control over that. There was also something of relief: that I could just get taken out by a wave. How much more honest a destruction that would be than the slow surrender to gratuitous stress.

Oh, the rancor I am cultivating.

(If you are looking for a god, you will find one.)

Limitlessnesses of human suffering. There are many, all documented.

I have this confidence that when what would seem unbearable comes, it will be endured for lack of any other choice. And so, when I feel the sting of someone else's atrocity, that hint that something like that could and may be uniquely mine one day, I look to their strength as a harbinger of what my strength will be. We are the same, then. And so, when I am in touch with that, I feel more resolve not to do any harm to anyone for harm will come anyway. All respite from suffering should be respected.

But it doesn't seem to work that way.

I have been suffering, in that priveleged existential way. Utterly unhappy. Not minding death, the gold cup of shirking responsibility. I've been getting stomach aches, I don't sleep well. I feel numb or I feel despair. It's hard to stand up—I cling to the soft hot center of my relationship to feel alive. That can't be good.

Well, it can't continue.

The quick of it all is fear—the usual celebrity. There's the actual possible consequences, which I can't control (but which I think I can), and then my fear of them, which is where responsibility lies.

But I think I have a strategy, or at least I've reached a point where actual survival has kicked in. For me, it's a massive campaign to defend personal integrity at the risk of rejection, even if that rejection is nonsensical. It's so much easier to defer, to instantly believe in my inferiority. I don't care about the source of that dysfunction, only about the mystery of its speed and indomitability—the well fortified LTP.

Where is its weakness that I might subdue it?

The circuits are fast!

(40 mph fast, to be exact.)

Well, I can't figure out how I can succeed in academia and maintain personal integrity without being labeled insubordinate. (I have already been called that—twice.) The consquences are real: Years of investment cancelled at the whim of someone who feels slighted by the lack of demonstrated dependence.

I have to work on the art of sublety, I know. I also have to do some other, real things. Making time for friends, for example, and getting enough sleep. I need to take the heat and not take it personally—that old thesis in undoing.

I just keep thinking of the real threat of that wave and the pivot of life and death. So, whenever I see the narcissistic slap striking at me, I think of its arrogance and how I don't have to be a party to it. It's possible to remain on the path without making it paramount and without letting it consume me like it does others.

I have been operating under the false assumption that I must enjoy, even lust for, all aspects of the science to justify the pursuit; and that longing to fulfill other interests would signal an incompatibility with the vocation and the time to quit it. But recently I remembered, and realized more deeply, that it doesn’t have to be that way. I can like the science without respecting academic culture; I can participate without being owned. And, I can treat it like a job and not something I am.

Overidentifying with a vocation is as pathological as overidentification in interpersonal relationships. You can have a vocation that is a thing you do and not what you are. That's what it should be, but that's not what is modeled. I have to be my own model, I see now, and this model demands a year of return. Last year got away from me and I neglected house and friends and arts—myself. I've been feeling wretched as a result. I'm calling for a year of domesticitiy: being at home, the deep yellow light of solitude and quiet rituals.

We will all die, unknowing when or how. Nothing can usurp the deeply personal obligations the knowledge of that truth signifies. The next part of the challenge is to dissipate the disgust I feel for those who casually demand that kind of sacrifice.

Andrew gave me a 5-disc DVD/CD/SACD player for Christmas. I wasn’t thrilled at first; I thought it would be just an extenuation of a capability I already enjoyed. But when it was set up and turned on, and once Andrew had used his sensitive ears to tune the whole rig, the room revived with the vividness of the newer technology. I hadn't realized how much I'd been favoring the old machine and forgoing listening to or watching things I enjoy. Now it is an agent for helping me make good on the strategy for getting through the year. He was so far ahead of me.