I'm between the poles and the equator

Two posts in one day, that is a record for me. It's funny that, right after celebrating my lack of connectivity for the last week, I've been overindulging in AIM and blogging today. My cousins keep sending me essays to edit for various applications to various high schools/colleges/graduate schools. I'm thinking about turning it into a fee-for-service situation. My cousin S agreed with this as a viable business plan, but pointed out "of course, you can't charge family though." Gee, thanks, there goes my whole target group, since no one else would be insane enough to ask me to help them with writing.

And yet in some ways, this complaining about technology one minute and swimming in it the next reflects a typical problem of mine, of being too much in the middle, of always seeming a walking contradiction. I'm a cynical dreamer, a hopeful pessimist. And I really mean both. I really am that jaded, and I really am that romantic as well. I crave adventure, and yet recoil from it just as much. I don't mind, as long as I continue to force myself to oscillate. I know I could be a drug addict or a complete pollyanna, but I aspire to neither such extreme. I don't mind these brushes with danger and temptation if they are equally accompanied by quiet nights spent musing over the whole of the moon. As long as I remain removed from complacence, I can continue to breathe. Maybe some people are just meant to remain restless, meant to stay nomadic. But what of someone like me, who could never be satisfied wandering or rooted?

At times like this, when I start thinking along these lines, I pause and take a sip of tea. I breathe, and think, I'll hike Machu Pichu, and start to plan out the steps required to accomplish this minor goal of mine. Because here is a single-serving (TM Fight Club) ambition. It's bite-sized and tangible. Abhi much more eloquently captured this problem I seem to always struggle with... I'm paralyzed by the idea of insignificance, and yet simultaneously feel this urgency that I must make something happen today, now. And then, like Don Music on Sesame Street, I feel the urge to bang my head against a piano, yelping "I'll never get it, never!"