So many things boiling inside me. So many tracks ahead of me.

I have a pile of books that is now the height of my bed. The Plague (Camus, and current), The Proof House (KJ Parker), Lost Souls (Poppy Z Brite), Dune (Frank Herbert), Makers of Modern Strategy (various, and work, and yet not), and Foucault's Pendulum (Umberto Eco, and yes, a re-read, but lately I have found myself plagued with references, with hints, with half-remembered glimpses of the shrouded truth, and I want to recapture the throat-tightening beauty of the faint despair and intricate tragedy that was this book).

I have a novel, lurking around my room in densely-typed pages and scribbled notes on the back of desk-calendar pages. Around my mind in the tilt of a chin and a line curtly delivered. I have the urge to write, to get it all out, to shape the words like raw clay into a vessel that can hold my imagination in tangible form.

I have idleness, pulling at me with sticky fingers, offering a horde of delights. Roleplay, the crack-cocaine of writing, computer games, long, luxuriant coffee and Friday-conversations in Cafe J^e.

And I have university. Demanding with its financial justification my attention, my time, my efforts. And yet still interesting. Fascinating. Ready to suck me into a whirlpool of academia. Spending the rest of my life balancing in the compator shelves, fuelled by university-cafe coffee and this inexplicable curiosity about things no one else cares about. An office, lined with the books picked up on my travels (three more garnered today at the Co-op book sales, where everything was two dollars - one on prophecy, one on eastern European post-war communism, one on the trial of Queen Caroline). As you can see, I have thought overmuch about this possibility.

I want... I want... I want...

I don't know what I want. And in six months I finish my degree. I never wanted to think about this day because it was four (three... two... one...) years away and honestly, things would sort themselves out by that time, right? You'd think I knew myself better. But here I am, five days short of 21, and wallowing in indecision.

You know what? I wouldn't have it any other way.