It's been nearly two years since I've written anything here. It hasn't felt like that much time has passed.

Around this time last year, in the middle of a trip with Piotr, the fact that this blog exists came to me and as I remembered and started reading, I cried.

I'm really grateful that it exists. I think it's a rare gift for a person to have a decade-plus-long record of their thoughts, sporadic though it may be.

Tonight I went back and read some unpublished drafts. This one in particular, from September 2010, struck me:

Been thinking a lot lately, mostly about how I don't want to be.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how much I hate suburbia, the nuclear family, the office job.
What it comes down to, however, is that I am terrified of mediocrity.
I don't want to have a mediocre, lukewarm marriage.
I don't want to live vicariously through my kids and extracurricular sports.
I really don't want to get excited over office gossip and the prospect of house renovations.
Other people are starting to slip into it...so willingly too, and it drives me crazy.

The tone of distain is interesting--I wonder where it comes from? Fear, maybe? It sounds like at that time, I had a strong notion that a life involving the things above would be one that is devoid of meaning. Petty and small-minded. Maybe there is a little truth in some of this, but I also feel now that this blanket judgement misses the point.

These days, mediocracy is not a concept that I think very much about or try hard to avoid. If Alain de Botton has had any influence on my thinking, maybe trying to attain mediocracy is exactly what I should be doing. Besides, there are more important things.

So, maybe an updated blurb about the life I don't want to live:
- I still don't want to be petty
- I don't want to be status-seeking
- I want to live with ease, moments of being at home in myself
- I want to live without forgetting (too much) the larger, more expansive reality