I feel forgotten and alone, like I have outgrown most of my surroundings and my people and myself and they aren’t catching up. The others, the ones that I haven’t outgrown, are different from me. They have kids and homes and spouses and jobs.

I’m going to be 30 in a moment. I’m ready to be an adult — a boring adult. An adult with a sportcoat and a briefcase and a desk. I feel silly walking around in a hoodie and jeans. I’m not a Californian or an East Coast club kid. I’m a scholar. I’m a scholar because I say I am and because my work is sound and my ideas are deep and can add something to the world. I’m brilliant and I have real achievements and experience. I have to be careful not to sell myself short.

I think innocent childhood and wacky youth and fashion and rock concerts look silly on some grown men of 30 and can only look sillier on me as I get older. There are things that I want to do, and things that I want to contribute, that are closed avenues to hoodie-wearing, keg-party-going jeans-wearers.

I also feel alone just now, like nobody who knows me is noticing me right now, just my muddy footprints and leftover pizza crusts. They’ll notice me later, and by then they’ll be surprised at where I’ve gone, because they won’t realize that they haven’t been paying attention, or even that they had me all wrong to begin with.

As I’ve said so many times before here, I’m going to bed.

I feel as though I could write a dissertation until I actually log in and wonder what to post. At that point, the requirement for actual lexical specificity hits me, and I realize that there is no linguistic method by which all of “my personhood, right now, please empathize” can be conveyed. Everyone experiences this. It’s rough on us all, particularly when we feel alone and bewildered.

My years at university thus far have been the best of my life, much moreso when I was struggling deeply to make a go of it (versus the moments during which the work was more or less automatic and brainless). The sense of achievement I’ve felt at times is truly majestic — and oddly enough, I’ve never felt such things at the moment of earning a degree. Instead, I’ve always felt it when I’ve been able to articulate an argument in just the way that I conceptualize it, or when I’ve managed to produce a paper that I’m proud of, or a body of work that I feel has changed someone’s mind or opened new avenues for instruction for future students.

I’m hoping that all of this continues when I get back into school once more. It’s a very conscious decision I’m making, and like (I suspect) nearly all individuals who pursue this avenue in their lives (and make no mistake, it does take over one’s life at some point), I’m not all all positive that it’s the “best possible choice.” Instead, I’m operating on a lot of intuition and gut feeling and experience that suggests prudent courses of action, rather than deeply logical or wise ones, to me.

There remains, however, a large part of me that is starved for something much simpler, which I do not pursue simply because most indicators suggest that it is not easily guaranteeable, regardless of the amount of labor invested. Thus, I do what I am sure I can complete, rather than sacrificing all to pursue what fate must ultimately grant me, if it is willing.

Forks in the road. Frustrating in a short life. Frustrating indeed, and lonely, too.

So CNN and most of the western media are reporting that the cartoons were created by Danes in response to the Danish press’ request for depictions of Muhammed, as someone was writing a children’s book in Denmark and couldn’t find Muhammed pictures. They further report that Imam(s) in Denmark, outraged at the printing, took these cartoons to Egypt to ask authorities there for political support in the Muslim world, and that Egypt gave it. They suggest that the reason for the delay in uprising was the season of the Hajj, before whose end no Muslim authority would look at them or consider the issue… and that once the Muslim world saw them, the game was on.

Only now it comes to light that these cartoons were first published in a mainstream paper in Egypt in 2005 (see also here and here), without riots, without protests, without even too many “letters to the editor,” it would seem. Then in recent days, only when the U.S. has brought the Iran nuclear issue to a head and referrals to the security council have been made… now that the U.S. is beginning to make noises about invading Iran and Syria… we get Iran and Syria supporting an explosion of violence and rioting that warrants international condemnation?

I don’t think of myself as a conspiracy theorist for the most part, but something does not compute. The Arab free press right now is going nuts over their own conspiracy theories about the governments in the region and why it is expedient for them to foment violence over these cartoons just now, but I can think of a bigger, badder government that could use a similar show of radical extremism in the western press just now… and this bigger, badder government, oddly enough, is responsible for propping half of those despotic regimes anyway (the ones we prop up or have created ourselves would generally be the ones we don’t plan to invade, I suppose… oh, wait…)