it's one of those curl up on the couch and/or bed with a good book kind of days. problem is i don't know which book to pick up. i have the bell jar, on the road and love is a mixtape atop my time magazine special edition of america in world war two. i have read the first two so this would be more a re-read situation. i want to read them all but i find my decision making skills when it comes to reading a bit wishy washy. maybe it's because i read for four solid years, countless books and articles, that i am in need of a break or due to that forced reading i am subconsciously against it now. so i write.

i am not feeling as terrible as i thought i would about not going back to school. i wandered through the bookstore on thursday quite free, feeling untied to the bonds of education but also close to what it offers me. i don't have to pay for it anymore. i have always felt that paying for education isn't a waste, ever ever, but it's liberating to know how freely i can walk amongst proust, burroughs, richard taylor and lawrence without a schedule or five hundred word assignments. i miss the structure, i do, but now i can focus on my possible freelance gig and contributing whatever i can to the writing world when i can do it.

i hesitate to say that things are different because it seems cliched, though i have uttered the phrase many a-time. the difference i feel isn't necessarily due to one thing in particular or anything like that. it's this whole moving forward while still recognizing the past thing i've got going on. i have a job but it's temporary. i live at home but it's temporary. i have italy and las vegas (and maybe new york in november) on the horizon. i am making more money than i ever have before and i could end up moving out next august completely debt free. but something is different. i can't articulate it in a cryptic enough way so i won't even try. it just is and i don't think it will ever be able to go back to what it was. i don't think i want to even go back that way if there was the opportunity. it is now. it was then. this is what it is. is is is. i am willing to trip over the past because it is me but this has always been temporary, i think. i suppose i failed to write in a non-cryptic way. it's what i do.

twenty-one. i like twenty-one. you'd like me to not be twenty-one.