Here's one that feels inspirational today, after several days of long hard slogging at the day job:

"If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven played music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well."
--Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)

"I will be myself as a grown-up. I wouldn't be anything else."
--Taiga Endo, age 5, answering the question "what do you want to be when you grow up?"


I want to be a knitter. I want to play the taiko drums. I want to paint miniatures. I want to be a sumo wrestler. I want to breed and show cats. I want to read some of the books that have sat untouched on the shelf for years – there must be at least a hundred of them by now – not to mention my list of requests at the library, all on hold indefinitely. I want to play Roller Derby. I want to make and sell bead jewelry. I want to be a writer.

And that's just for starters.

I so want to be and do anything other than what I am doing now, which is struggling painfully at a job which up until now, I have loved. There is too much to do and learn and apply, nowhere near enough time to do and learn and apply it all. The harder I work, the further I fall behind. The darker side of myself, the critical voice in my head which tries its damndest to sabotage all that I do, for the sheer pleasure of saying, "See? I knew you were a failure. I told you so," is running absolute riot. Sometimes I feel like I'm holding on to my sanity by a thread which is fraying even as I watch.

Today it seems like the best I can do is roll with the punches and tell myself the same thing I do when the political situation gets me down (been telling myself this a lot, since November of 2000):

"The wheel will turn. It always does."

So here I am, myself as a grown-up. And that's all that I am.

I guess it could be worse, eh?