So I am feeling a little sick today, and have been pretty grumpy in general. Plans having fallen through, I have not made it out of Queens, or even more than a mile from my house today, the only accomplishment having been a haircut, which, for once, I did not even intend to give myself. That, and snapping at people unnecessarily.

But this is liberating in a way, not having a day of which to speak, that I might ramble as before more untethered from my contingencies. I think I am reaching the point in my life when I begin to wonder if I am serious enough. This, however, is not to say that I worry about the opinions of others--that is a worry long left behind in college. It's more about how big a world I fit into. For instance, now on Friendster I am connected to some 54 thousand people (within 4 removes: what would Plato have to say about that?), but this is surely a bujii, netbound subset, and many of my first-remove friends are newbies I am grooming to help with my expansion. But this is too small a view too: I guess it's that old scale I have long used to characterize (from my male-centric view of the world, I must admit), which is not to say that these are definite stages in some inevitable process of evolution, but tendencies, directions you can go in how you act, react, think, plan, review: there is the boy, presexual in his desires, the type who watches Star Trek or builds model cars and has all of this wonderful trivia to share, still marvels in the world as a menagerie of minutiae; there is the guy who is sexual, and this is to say competitive--worth and value and values are defined in terms of others, of keeping up, how much and where and how often, of a peacock strut conspicuously consumptive; there is then the man who lives more in terms of responsibility, not only to family and friends, but for community--the statesman in the aristocratic mode, but defined not by blood but by purpose.

The point here is not taxonomical, reductive, categorical: the point is to point: to point where one can go, to give a framework for why we do what we do. I will not stop drinking, I will not stop cruising (to some degree): but I am getting old enough to want to have a point.