live and active cultures

There is much from this last month that I'm proud of. Cool people and cool things, back-to-back and all strung together. My proximity to them has made me feel powerfully alive, and grown-up.

It has also overwhelmed me, all this coolness. Strung together in my datebook as it is, in different colors denoting the categorical divisions I've invented to "organize" my life, packed in so tightly that during the short hours when I'm alone, I can motivate no greater action than watching NBC shows on my laptop--this coolness has kept me from writing, has inched out one of the best and most validating parts of me. I mean that I have done that; I've neglected my work.

I read these words now and they remind me of something I heard Francis Ford Coppola say about pretentiousness. They feel clumsy and inarticulate, the reaching words of someone who used to wield words. But merely writing them is such a deep relief to me, to this nebulous physical weight I've been carrying behind my eyes. I ask myself for the thousandth time if I'm a writer, and today I tell myself that I must be since writing is the only thing that makes me sick when I don't do it.

A writer. The title makes me beam and shiver. Looking at it conjures dubious images of my path, and I muse that perhaps it's just the finality of the period that scares me. I already feel a sense of competition and rejection, and exhaustion from this seemingly relentless hustle of life -- but I know (at least rationally) that all of this is self-imposed. I wonder if should I go back to school, worry that I won't make enough money, that I won't be able to have a family, that I'll end up with nothing. I'm 25 now and I'm scared to be what I am.

I don't want to be scared and I don't want to be neglectful. I want to self-actualize and make beautiful things. I want to be brave. Tomorrow I'm going to start a new post for the Weekly about a very special restaurant in Venice. I'm going to try to communicate love and professionalism with an earnestness that I that I haven't used before. I want to know that I can. It'll probably go up on Thursday, and I'll repost it here then.