i just want you to change my life.

I've spent the last month of my life on hiatus from work; given an extended vacation, I assumed that a great deal might come to pass.

I wasn't wrong; I knew that I'd expect to write a great deal and not do so, and I knew that I'd expect to get done all of the things I avoid doing the rest of the time, and not do so. That these things never got done is less of a disappointment and more of a reassurance that wherever I go, there am. Still, a lot can happen in a month, and as I barrelled my way through cold Midwestern visits and midday shopping sprees in Soho and awkward birthday parties and a changing sea of faces in front of Jameson pours, the one thing that was constantly present was myself. At some point, I figured out how to live in the moment enough to enjoy the moment, and I was glad for it even as I built my way towards thinking about Really Important Things.

One of the important things on my mind is career; I've been blessed with one I love, but it's a complicated sort of relationship and it's one I know I can't sustain forever. To that end, I've spent a lot of time thinking about what I might want to do next - what am I good at, what do I love, and what could I actually make a living from? I've posed the question to close friends and come up with some interesting responses. It's important to know who thinks you're meant for the nonprofit world and who would love to see you become a professor of philosophy after all, even if these things seem less than tangible in my own eyes.

In all of this, there is one thing I have realized I'm in love with, and it is both serious and silly at the same time: one of the things I do best is re-imagine other people's lives. Where there's an unhappy friend, there's usually some kind of solution, and I love reaching inside of people and figuring out their best bits and suggesting that maybe they'd be really pleased with themselves if they tried this alternate career or augmented their current job with that extracurricular creative pleasure. I love re-imagining other people's lives, and I like to think that once in a while it actually sparks such ideas in their heads.

And so this evening I recommended to Eddy that he quit life as he knows it and take up an extended train trip around the country, writing about the experience as he goes, and just the thought of it made me wildly excited for such a future and what it could hold. If I could do one thing and get paid for it, it would be this: I would write the imaginary biographies of everyone I know, and then I would let them live inside of the worlds that I dreamed especially for them.