A few moments ago, I finished hanging my laundry. This, at first glace, sounds like a normal activity carried out from time to time as necessary, but to me carried much greater significance. I had not, in over a year, hung my laundry up. For nearly a year and a half, I've been instead choosing to leave clean laundry in a pile, choose from it what I wished to wear and then throw it down into the dirty pile at day's end. However, I do not think that the laundry itself was the important part so much as what it reflected: my own apathy towards my environment in specific and my existence in general.

At work, I've spent most of the last year riding on the successes of the previous. I haven't been nearly as productive as I could have been; I haven't been as diligent as I should have been. At home, I've been allowing things to pile up: half-finished projects, empty boxes, unplayed games stacked 10 high. Perhaps worst of all, I have moved nowhere either socially or romantically. I haven't even looked for either sort of companionship despite the occasional pangs of lonliness that shake me. All of this I have spent the last year suppressing in the way that I have for nearly the last decade.

Recently, however, some things are bringing my errors into perspective. Firstly, I have been reading Atlus Shrugged. Although there is much within the book that one can and should disagree, much of the novel acts as an indictment of my last year of life: hanging on as a leech rather than building as I should. I don't expect nor even desire to be the sort of "tireless industrialist" that the book raises onto the highest pedistal, but it seems that I could be more than I have been. Secondly, today I went to an orientation meeting wherein I and others were prepped--somewhat haphazardly--to be "buddies" to summer students a JPL. This meeting, and the topics discussed therein, brought oncemore to the fore how small my world here in California is. I live in sprawling a city of nearly 18 million people. Somewhere in that mess must be the correct place for me. And of course, seeing the changes in others make one's own seem all the more stark.

I don't intend to try to change everything at once. First, I'll reclaim my apartment as mine, the way I wish it to be. It will become my foothold. Concurrently, I'll retake my work the way it had been when I started nearly two years ago. After that, I'll see where I stand and continue to move forward.

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