I'm going to Alaska in the fall to teach high school ELA in Unakleet (you-na-kleet) - a bush town of 800 people. I'm pretty much stoked. Pretty much, it's going to be a whole new way of life. I can't even believe it, really. Every once in a while I just get so excited, like, whoa, I'm going to Alaska. I'll suddenly remember that it's actually going to happen, it isn't just a daydream that I made up in my head. I'm going. It's real.

All this moving around, this fear of commitment, this fear of not living my life to the fullest and doing everything that I absolutely can, it's good and bad. I'm not ready to settle. I'm not ready to commit. I want to keep going and moving and experiencing new things. I realized, before and while my dear friend Kamorin reminded me: between all of that, where is the space for relationships? I was thinking about it - perhaps I fear the commitment of relationships as much as I fear the commitment of staying in one place. I think too much, I think, about the shortness of life, and how it will all end anyway and be very painful and tragic, so why bother? I may as well just stay with myself and enjoy the time that I have by avoiding any unecessary pain. But then I think about another good friend, Andy, who believed quite the opposite about this very issue. He had the same questions as me, but decided to conciously allow himself to love as deeply as he was led to, to open up and be just as was entirely natural and humanly desired, and when the end comes, he says, it will just come, and that will be something to deal with then, but not now. I think that is what I have to do, wherever I go with whomever I meet. And I'll settle somewhere someday, long term. I will. Someday. Not today.

I'm going to Alaska.

:)