Internet has been down for several days, which is being frustrating, but fortunately happened at about the same time that I got fed up trying to look at law school web sites on a shaky dial up connection, and so I am trying not to pay too much attention to it.

I don’t think I received any new bites last night, so I’m hoping my application of insecticide and airing of my mattress were sufficient to take care of bed bugs. I don’t have a lot of hope though.

I turn 30 in four months. I am having a hard time being motivated about anything. I just finished reading a non-fiction book by John Grisham title “The Innocent Man.” The main character takes a long time to give up on his dreams of being a baseball star, and it has me thinking about my dreams and how I tend to deal with the realization that they most likely won’t be fulfilled. I guess I’ve gone through stages of that, from the less realistic dreams of achieving enlightenment or being a martial arts master or a computer hacker (ah high school) to the still unrealistic but at least possible dreams of teaching Aikido, being a good ultimate frisbee player, and having one of those marriages where they still love each other after 60 years.

My dreams now have morphed into “plans,” and plans have to be more concrete and realistic. They include provisions for a career that I think will be meaningful and engaging, for encouraging continued writing, and for a happy (if not perfect) family. But so far I haven’t completely given up on what might be called dreams, and I am starting to wonder if my dreams are interfering in my ability to be happy in reality. Is exchanging dreams for plans just something that happens as you get older? You can’t live your life in dreams, but you can’t live it in drudgery either. But it does seem like it can pass by while you are too busy thinking about dreams or drudgery.

All of this pondering is, in some sense, just the useless spinning of wheels. Bringing things back to here and now is important, especially in the erie suspension that is Peace Corps. But its also important to have a sense of getting somewhere. That is hard to do when plans go haywire because you don’t really know where you are going. Perhaps where you are going isn’t as important as we tend to think it is, but I haven’t really adjusted to that cultural reality yet, if I ever will.

Or I am just finally shifting from spending too much mental energy on life after Peace Corps to thinking about the here and now, and so all that planning seems sort of unnecessary now.