Balance

While in Ocean City, I was able to catch up on some good beach reading. A while ago---perhaps even for college graduation, my Aunt gave me a book of essays of writers on writing. The one I really loved was Gish Jen's Inventing Life Steals Time, Living Life Begs it Back--and it was about the dichotomy a writer experiences between the real world and the fictional world and how does one find a balance between living and writing. I think that's something so many of us struggle with---for we writers could always be writing, but how much of that writing will actually be worth it. Do we sacrifice our lives for our writing or do we sacrifice our writing for our lives?

With the book coming out, I feel like I'm at some kind of cross roads, though I would like to think, I'm just walking along and finding enough time to stop and smell the roses, but also walking briskly enough. It rained all day, a fitting end to the summer as I'm getting ready for a new semester. Tomorrow is my first day teaching and I have this excited nervousness that I can't seem to shake, that always pops up at this time. I remember it from college, even when I wasn't the one in charge. It's like a new page. I love the way the air smells. It smells like college. One of my best friends from college called a few days ago to tell me some exciting news, she's pregnant and I think even though how much it seems like I'm not that far removed from that time of thinking and drinking, we've come so far from those halls of Heer.