I spent a lot of time over January running around Europe and as a result didn't have the kind of time over that break to do the thinking I'd done the year before. I've spent the semester apologizing for not being able to explain to people what it is I want to do. I hadn't really had time to rethink my direction since some major developments in my understanding -- most significantly, my discovery of Henry Jenkins's work on subversive writing in fan cultures, and other writings on people's uses, rather than effects, of media.

Well, I *thought* I hadn't thought about it. But I've done some talking to a few people, and tonight I decided that it's not that I haven't thought about it; it's just that I'm repressing my decision.

Tonight I overheard my roommate Jamie talking to someone about his plans for after his graduation this summer. I am unhappily beginning to accept that he's leaving. It's likely to really rip me up when he does. I only just recently got over my last roommate leaving. Ten years of moving and leaving and changes, and I still take it on the chin every time. There's a couple of other key friends who are likely to be leaving for the summer, too; if I'm in a deep funk come June, you'll know why.

I like people. (aside: they're the ones who can stand.) They matter a lot to me. And ten years ago, when I graduated high school, I would have beat myself up for even thinking that. My misbegotten feminism told me I was bad for caring about lovers and family and kids as much as my own intellectual and professional development. (Thanks a lot to the frigid soccer moms at my school who squelched any public displays of affection I made. That just about did it, guys.)

There was an even more insidious math to my way of thinking than I even want to admit. I recently managed to express its central equation as "those who can, do; those who can't, teach," though it's probably a little more complicated than that. I saw the English teachers I looked up to -- and my mother, who spent my earliest years at home and rarely worked in her field -- as creators manqué because they chose to spend their time with kids. I'm ashamed that I thought this way. I'm sorry. Even over the past few years I've confronted my mom about her choices to live with people she loved and abandon the professional studies she's periodically returned to. I didn't understand it, and I've had this inexplicable fear that somehow I'd end up doing the same thing, and it would be horrible and I'd feel trapped all my life.

But my mom... Around Thanksgiving one evening my mother told us about the Russian children a neighbor has adopted, and who she has been tutoring. She told us everything about all three of them, acted out with her whole body the way the little girl crumpled in frustration over her work. These kids, it was clear, had enveloped her. Mom loves people, too. (Mom passed along her love of anthropology to me, after all.)

Looking back, the only situations that have made me happy have involved caring, loving social groups, mentors and peers. I was desperately lonely when I lost them my second year at Hampshire. Despite all the talk of building community with the Independent Media Center, I felt completely alienated and unmoored during those first few years in New York. And the months of unemployment were just horrible, as I didn't even have people to go see every day. By contrast, TC has made me very content, and never more so than after the party we threw weekend before last.

It has slowly dawned that since I've been in graduate school, my fever dreams haven't been about writing the Great American Novel and being remembered for the ages. They haven't even necessarily been about changing the whole world, like they were in my last years of college and my first years out. They've been about becoming a principal and running a school that doesn't suck. I have had feverish daydreams about becoming a school principal and supporting teachers who want to do good work. And about teaching classes, in which I try to soothe the aches of kids who school is hurting. About being the kind of professor who teaches undergrads and has an institute which writes things that change policy and supports the community.

I've also been secretly coveting my stepmother's job as head of outreach for Caltech. I think it would be really cool to make the membrane between academia and the rest of the world more porous. Because the public needs some of the things that get talked about in there. Like, you know, evolution, for example. And proportional representation. And the Global South.

Is this because when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail? In high school I hung out with creative types and wanted to be a writer. In college I hung out with radicals, and wanted to smash the state for a living. In graduate school, I hang out with a lot of people who think being brainy is important and want to make modest gains in helping others become better thinkers, and so this is what I want to do?

I want to work to do good things for people I care about. God, but it's been hard to admit that. But at this point, what would be the purpose in being the Great American Novelist? I can keep blogging and writing the stray article. Having a story published wouldn't make me any more important. There's already so much useless information flowing around out there.

Anyway, I just feel happy thinking that maybe if I got my head out of my ass about admitting how important people are to me, I could do something good and solve my chronic loneliness problem at the same time. There's an additional set of ideas I need to settle for myself about media creation as it relates to media literacy and getting progressive messages out to the public... about how I came into this program wanting to be Michael Moore, and now, in the wake of things I've been reading, I don't really think that would be useful. but that is a procrastinatory excercise for another night. I have a paper due tomorrow.

Oh -- one last thing I have been meaning to mention -- I've seen a gastroenterologist who thinks I am probably NOT gluten intolerant. just to clear that up.