another year older...

Yesterday was the summer solstice. It also happened to be my birthday. You know how when you were little you used to try and convince yourself that suddenly on your birthday you really felt a whole year older than even on the day before? And even after you began to doubt that it worked that way, it still took several more years to accept it. Well, I guess I haven't entirely gotten over it, since I find myself now comparing where I am now not to where I was the day before my birthday (though in a literal sense the two are 1200 miles apart), but rather to where I was a year ago (which again is a difference of several thousand miles, but that's not the point). It's hard to say how far I've come, so to speak, leaving the geographical sense for now. In the last year I finished my master's degree, something that I honestly thought several months ago might not be possible, at least if I didn't care enough to write a thesis (and for a while I didn't). Anyway it is an accomplishment, and one which, depending on my mood and therefore the light that I look at it in, usually seems to me important and makes me feel good about myself. On the other hand, exactly a year ago I had a very clear picture of where I was going and what I was going to do with my life and with whom I was going to share it. When I was in Peru a year ago I told everyone who asked that I was going to get married in the next year or two and that I was going to get a PhD and become a university professor. Since then all of those plans have come crashing down, and now, because I had spent so much time and energy building them up, not only am I totally lost in the rubble, I don't even know what I want to build in their place. Sometimes I feel like I don't want to bother to build anything, since it will probably just fall down before I get to the top floor anyway. Heck, I haven't even cleared away the rubble from the last collapse. I like to think that I am ready for whatever life throws at me next (though I wouldn't go so far as to use the word 'prepared'). I just wish that it would finish warming up and throw it at me already. Because my own powers of reason and my emotions, partly because they're always arguing with each other, are not getting me anywhere except in little spirals.