in researching for graduate school, i feel once again like i am being asked to choose a topic for my undergraduate thesis when i never really got to learn what i wanted there so i settled.

i don't even know how many hours were spent absorbing meaningful yet purposeless information that never had a career in mind; no one asked me about career, or what i wanted, or how i was feeling about it. was amanda bayer still my academic advisor at the time? i don't remember, although i do remember that she considered hiring me to teach her daughter tap during the summer.

i feel like an idiot. the only place my life makes sense is in new york and even then, partly, maybe because it's full of people who only partly make sense, and in this way it is a community that is interdependent. it is not a brave or noble statement to make with your life that you survived and had beautiful experiences, but then there is that taste of aristocracy in the desire to be brave or noble or Kim Basinger playing white savior/survivor Kuki Gallmann on a ranch in Kenya. this is what i mean by fantasies i have of myself in "serving the greater good".  I'll never be more civic-minded than a cop, for instance, yet I'll try to earn triple her salary by proving that i'm clever.

but i have a lot of knowledge.  what can i tell you? what do you want to know? 

i am the proudest idiot you'll find on this earth.