Being in West Virginia always provokes me to write in this journal again, no matter how long it has previously suffered from neglect. I think this is because I need to write home to someone, to tell them all my earnest little observations. I should reawaken this sensibility for when I am living my default existence in Seattle, because I have let a great deal of life go by without discussing it here. I think this period of draught was incited by the news from Florida, which wasn't good. The expert surgeon I paid so much money to consult with decided that my case is inoperable.

Recording this event makes it final, something that is in the past, and this has not been something I have so far been willing to accept. I've gotten so used to deferring judgment about it that I have been afraid to do something different. I still don't know if acceptance is entirely within my grasp. I feel sick much of the time and I am worried about the future. But it could be much worse and I am capable of feeling joy and pleasure, for which I am grateful. As my father says, where there is life, there is hope.

Not that I don't do a lot of writing these days. It seems I communicate more with my fingers than with my tongue. If, fifteen years ago, someone would have told me that I would be regularly writing twenty letters a day, and that most of my human contact would involve discussing these letters, I would have thought this unlikely, and dreaded the detachment which such a fate might bring. I treasure the rare moments of deep, sustained human contact which come my way these days.

Work is going well; the intensity of it seems to continue to mount, which I appreciate, because I like to be very busy. Still, it can only get so crazy, because the environment is by definition non-crisis oriented, due to its elevation from the plane of the strictly financially transactional. The people are so nice to me. During the first week of classes I got to walk out on the lawn between my office and the student center, and take in a Guster concert, which I enjoyed immensely, as I almost always do with live music. The students were too shy and cool, I suppose, to move much, but I bounced and swayed like a younger version of myself, reveling in the way the music that I usually have piped only to my ears had everyone around me awash in the same sensations.

I learned of the death of my friend and former roommate Kelle Vogel at around the same time, sending my already nostalgic musings at being at a University at the beginning of another fall quarter down a somewhat darker path, and making me feel grateful that she had always seemed to live her life as if nothing was more important than her own bliss—in funny hats, in crazy makeup, in strange boys—and how lucky I am to still be around in the world, being basically the same strange, moody, occasionally ecstatic but mostly unfulfilled creature I was at age 20.

Writing in this journal and in email bring me pleasure, because I enjoy what I write, and because I think I am a good writer. But it is only in the context of communicating my own intimate thoughts that I am capable of this feat. When trying to do even the most rudimentary writing for websites, for the public, if it extends beyond simple information architecture, I find myself falling down all over myself and not knowing what on earth to say or to delete. I really admire people who can generate different voices in their writing, and I think my complete failure at it is the same failure behind my fear of public speaking. I think it is because my own internal narrative speaks so pronouncedly, constantly, and significantly, that I have no means of competing with it.

It is good to be here with my parents, my other home. The weather has cooled off and the sky is so blue, far more blue than it ever seems to be in Seattle. Perhaps this is because of the way it contrasts with the green of the mountains. There is always a moment after I arrive from my journey when I am horrified at the strangeness of everything and the way the pace here is so different—but then after a few hours this fades and I am pulled back into the way of living here, and I find myself smiling with utter relief at the detachment it provides from my regular life, which I live so intensely that it often feels like I am about to break. At night I lay in my bed by the window and enjoy the smell of the air and then, half-asleep, I hear the trains, and my entire life after age 17 seems to be some kind of strange dream.

I was nice to the man at the Avis counter and he upgraded my car rental to a shiny black Jeep mini-SUV w/Sirius radio, with which I am tearing up the roads with much joy, a spectacle you are encouraged to imagine in all its glory. My favorite station so far has been the retro new wave '80s channel, so the transformation back from grown-up, mellow butterfly to awkward, disenfranchised caterpillar is mostly complete.