Ever since I was placed on the Los Angeles payroll at the office I've spent most of my time working with people I rarely see. The phone is a warm and welcome respite from the isolation, but I still don't recognize many of the voices on the other end until they tell me their names. Mostly I write letters to these people. Sometimes in the morning there are fifteen mail messages waiting for me. I distantly recall a time when email was new and sexy, when it was the thing you did when you were through with the work of the day. It seems now to have become the very nature of my job: pushing the rock of project deliverables up the hill with a team of people connected by subject lines and inconsistent punctuation; carving stones out of ice with chopsticks, pouring a river of meaning through the slimmest of drinking straws. The English language does not fail to live up to the challenge but it grows tired inside me, and wishes it had some help on the ground.

This is probably the primary reason I keep pushing myself to look for jobs, send out resumes, and go to interviews. Despite the very real comforts of my current position — chief of which being virtually unlimited time off (because it is unregulated) and the ability to come and go as I please — I keep applying elsewhere. Sometimes I am afraid I am playing another game in my head with the pain, that the pain has convinced me that it will go away if I could just get a different job. Another part of me fears what I will choose to obsess upon if I get things right professionally. I know there was a time when I didn't really have a grasp on much of anything, except my Camel lights and the gravity bong. Over the last six years I've moved to a beautiful city, found a mate for life, and bought a house that heals and shelters me. I've realized I'm a dog person, not a cat person. I've recognized the sugar addiction at the root of so many of my problems and I've undergone successful surgery for a physical disorder that disrupted almost the entirely of my young adulthood.

This kind of perspective makes me feel less impatient about snapping my work life into shape. I suppose there are other, subsequent targets of my ambition looming in the future: understanding what life is about, coming to terms with death, adding to my family, and learning to cultivate and respond to the ever-present hum of my creative energies. Maybe things I didn't even think I could ever fix will succomb to my newly-dedicated will. Really, though, it feels like I am settling in for the long haul; I've grown up and now I want to make myself as useful to myself and the world for as long as possible.

I wanted to write tonight because I feel I neglect my journals. I do not want to wear myself out completely by writing all these emails in the course of life at the office. I want to save some, have a little left over, so that I can add to this record, add these documents which are essentially emails to my future self.

Friday I have a day-long interview at a place that excites me for a position that seems squarely in tune with my abilities. The pay is right and the location is exquisite. The primary drawback, that I can see, will be losing a great deal of flexibility. But as Mathew would say, I shouldn't worry about the decision until I actually have one to make. This weekend we are returning to Lake Crescent in the Olympic National Forest. We went there several years ago, right before my health crisis. I found it impossibly pristine, wild, and luscious. The water is deep and the mountains surround it. I am not pulled to the edge of the ocean because I dislike seeing that much of the horizon. I like the land to rise up and cradle me.

The Olympics are higher than the Appalachians but they share an air of gentle rounded antiquity that the Cascades and the volcanos eschew for a more pronounced geological alacrity. I will never stop missing those West Virginia hills. I watched a film last weekend called Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus. It took the viewer on a trip through the American South accompanying Jim White, a song writer who seems to have suffered the same kind of damage that I did by growing up an outsider in Appalachia. We are neither of the people, nor are we of the world beyond. We are both haunted by the beauty and power and darkness we saw growing up, and are now attracted to it, perhaps for the same reason we ran from it when we were younger: it is real and true and it doesn't try to be understood and it isn't like anything else anywhere. This culture is fascinated with us and hates us too, the same as it feels about what lies beyond the mountains. And like he says, there's no transfusion that can make the one into the other.

The film visits bars and prisons and churches, all of which brought back so many feelings and memories, especially of a time in my childhood when I was determined to find Jesus, because he would bring me a boyfriend, and that's what I wanted most. I also wanted an annotated bible with my name on it, because I could relate to the worship of books. But I couldn't be anything except shy in the expression of whatever spirituality lies in my cautious, stubborn bones. I couldn't get slain in the spirit or talk in tongues like my best friend could. She was equally talented with boys and I would have loved to enter that world but passion with real men would have to wait until I was closer to the end of my teen years and I'm still waiting for my religion to materialize, become a presence more substantial than a sense of rules and beauty, waiting for the rapture which I know this world holds in store, if only I could chip away at the face of all this routine and self-consciousness.