Chewing on a plastic straw.

I guess I've been lacking in the update department. Day to day it feels like I have a lot on my plate and am struggling to find a balance between things, but when I look back at my week or month I don't really remember accomplishing anything significant.

I think I read somewhere something about hypothetically having an extra $5,000 and the ways you could spend it. The author reasoned that you could either pay your bills on time or you could take a trip to Europe. Paying your bills would be the responsible thing to do, but one or ten years from then, what would be more significant? What would you remember more?

Europe, obviously. But I'm the bill-paying type.

I was taught from an early age to go exactly by the books. In second grade I cried in school because I spelled a word wrong on a spelling test. Nothing less than an A+ was acceptable to me or my parents. I got a job three days after I turned sixteen because that was the responsible and the right thing to do. I still save half, if not more, of everything I make (having a reliable checkings account is the "right" thing to do, too).

I went to college because it's what I was supposed to do.
By the books.

I decided to major in journalism because my mom always told me I would be a writer, so when I was a senior in high school and I still couldn't figure out what made me happy, I chose the second best thing: what made my mom happy. If she said it was right, I reasoned it must have been.

I can't even fathom the number of times I've applied the "right" concept to a situation. More and more it feels like I'm doing things for purely logical reasons instead of doing things that really make me happy.

More and more, it feels like I'm just a machine with shiny cogs and levers but no drive to get any real work done.

Sometimes I want to be able to know that I am capable of doing something completely unpredictable and out of my element.

But I and everyone I'm close to knows I am not there yet and in turn, I'm barely tolerable.