In which Daniel rambles, and looks to the glorious horizon.

            How fitting it is that, as I write this, my last blog post of this semester, I once again sit in a Starbucks, the sky overcast above me and my mug filled with green tea latte.  Yet this time, I am not in Tacoma, Washington, but Raleigh, North Carolina, where my family now lives, and it is to my family’s house, not Rat Skin Thong, that I return tonight.  And how things have changed!  I’ve wildly fumbled my way through what I’ve been told is the first half of the hardest year of college for music majors, my family is moving from one house to another in the North Carolina Triangle Area, Katy Perry came out with a new album, and I realized that I will always, if given the opportunity, lay on the floor.

Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing with my life.  Why, for example, am I writing this blog?  Purely for the fiscal compensation?  For the chance to assertively force my viewpoints on others over the internet?  To give myself a reason to sit in Starbucks for hours on end?   I have no desperate necessity for the money, no viewpoints I feel legitimately deserve to be forced upon others through blogging, and I’m willing to sit in Starbucks for hours for absolutely no reason, so none of these answers are correct.  I suppose I write this blog partially for the fiscal compensation, and mostly for the opportunity to have my writing published, and partially because I simply love writing, and looking at myself objectively, I believe that these are all good reasons.  But I’ll admit that with this, and all sorts of other things that I do often without second thought – going to college, finding any form of employment, making myself vaguely presentable – I will sometimes stop and suddenly be struck by the slight absurdity of what I’m doing.

I’m not trying to say that any of the things I listed above are absurd, per se, so much as that I will do them without thinking of why I’m doing them, so that when I do question them, I will be momentarily and forcibly faced with some sort of glimpse of what I suppose adulthood, or maybe life, is.  I will never be able to reclaim my childhood in Palo Alto, never be able to have another walk down the street to the park with my dog as a puppy; never be able to peruse the Mitchell Park Library in search of the poetry of Rumi; never be able to have another tickling-wrestle match with my friends on the trampoline in my backyard.  And I don’t necessarily want to reclaim it, for there are far too many things to which I look forward for me to spend so much time looking back, but the small revelations informing me that I am stumbling ever closer to being some form of an adult are just a little saddening, as well as a very exciting.

There is no moral to the story here.  I am caught in this strange between-sort-of time in a between-sort of place, between semesters of college and houses and phases of personhood.  It’s as if I am finishing the prologue in the book of my life and will soon turn the page to begin the first chapter, although I also cannot say when that will begin. But even as things change so much, they remain the same and I am still continually wondering what I am doing and why I am doing it, as I have been wondering for so long and as I will continue to wonder.  So, dear reader, assuming you have stayed with me thus far, I hope you have, to some extent, enjoyed my past semester of ramblings, and I look forward to one more semester of adventures that I may share with you.

Onward, dear reader, for the horizon is ours!