Quote of the day

Matt Yglesias:

Nobody will ever be able to tell friends he’s hiking on the Appalachian Trail again.

That's right.

Sigh, the story of my life

The story of my life, via Noah Millman (suitably modified, of course, for my life, but I'll let you fill in the gaps):

When I got out of school, my ambition was to write. And I started a novel, as yet unfinished.

I worked on the book for a number of years, but increasingly my “day job” – that is to say, my career – got in the way. But that’s not really a fair way to put it: it’s fairer to say that my career was an escape, a kind of grand procrastination scheme.

Then, as my career advanced, my writer’s itch returned. I started blogging, in part to scratch that itch, but also as a way of procrastinating from the responsibilities of my career.

Now, lately, I’ve been finding it harder and harder to blog. Sometimes I really want to write about A, and wind up blogging about B as a way of procrastinating from writing about what I want to write about. Sometimes I just kill time.

And when I take the next step, and find ways of procrastinating from killing time to avoid blogging to escape my job to forget my novelistic ambitions . . .

(But perhaps I’ve just done it?)