Got a melancholy old feeling this Saturday; lost, longing and out of place. The seeker is back on his heels, looking around with wonder. It feels like a day that would have been perfect for fulminating down in Cafe Commons, or for sitting in the kitchen of a Chinatown loft with a french press. Soon enough I'll get some coffee and get moving. Today I want to work out, then see Frank's play, then go to Wes's birthday party down at the Cellar. At the moment I'm still laying on the futon, listening to Wes practice acoustive guitar and the sound of traffic swishing along on the rain-soaked BQE.

I'm feeling a little pulled apart lately. I want to be working towards something, making some kind of real progress in my life. At the same time, I find the state of the world and my own inclincations strongly push me away from accumulation, careerism, social climbing or any other kind of pursuit that really amounts to working ones tail off to impress other people.

And yet I do want to impress other people. I crave recognition, influence, respect. I just don't jive with the idea that this is something I should explicitly work towards. In my own romantic ideas of how you get by in life, you do what you do because you love doing it, and because you love doing it you do it well, and because you do it well whatever you do is valuable to some other portion of humanity. Quality and generosity are not widely-held values in our current culture, however, so in real terms what a lot of people do is spend a lot of energy convinving other people that they're good at what they do, or that what they do is vitally important or breathtakingly brilliant. It's called sales and marketing, and it's where a good chunk of the money in the world goes.