I am a fulltime college student now, at a real live actual university. I’ve got a Russian professor and budding hero-worship of John Maynard Keynes, and I have started learning science things that from the first day of PHYS 221 I know that laypeople can no longer follow. I’m on the lowest part of a very long ladder, but I’m still pretty high. Higher every day.

How do you frame a human life? For so long I only chased one thing at a time. Acting and theatre. Then a “real job” in the corporate world. Then college and education and science. I think I’m going to quit that and come out of the closet as a threefold being. There are times in your life when you feel the distant vibration of Change coming your way, and this is a time in my life when I feel that. The distant drums of a new way to be.

My younger self was so different. Unrecognizable. But I’m still her. I can touch-type now and keep a clean house but I am still her… I typed that as “still here” and had to fix it. Are you still here, Jennifer-That-Was? When I look in the mirror, I can see you, deep inside and rising to the surface like a slow, slow swimmer coming up from the warm depths of my youth.

If I’m going to play the game of Framing, and if I am going to play it with my one sweet life, I give up the label that so many, including myself, want to give me: scientist. It’s time to take on a threefold identity as writer, performer, and learner/explainer. Now THAT is a more comfortable fit.

Who was a I kidding when I gave up performing? Who was I kidding when I gave up economics and politcal science? Where did I get the idea that I had to pick one, focus on one? Why was that the right way to do things? For now, I give in to gratifying my mind and going forward with something that’s less like a destination and more like an identity.

Funny. Nothing has changed but my attitude. But I think that everything has changed and is changing.

I hope I’ll soon have more time to write. So many good, flavorful ideas are crowding my mind, and it saddens me that only I get to hear them. They’re good things, these. I want to talk about having an audience, on how it’s intent and audience that separates the “artist” from the commerical artist. I want to talk about how provinciality is good, but enlightened provinciality is better.

And hey, if you’ve got a spare 10 minutes for an amazing article that I just found through the wonderful serendipities of the American college education, look here:

Change or Die

Just read it. It’s about why so many people who have to change their diet for medical reasons or die often choose to die, and how one doctor beat the statistics and got a group of patients to choose what I can only call life. But it’s not about eating or diet in the slightest. It’s about framing the way you live your life.

So. Off to change the litter and wash dishes. Off into the rest of my life.

This weekend I plan to learn how to knit cables when I take a class to make these sweet wristwarmers with simple cables in. I’d watch a new Doctor Who episode on YouTube tonight but I want to save it for the more theatrical experience of a DVD.

I’m still me. But when I look in the mirror I see someone new, peeping out. I look a little different, like my eyes got greener or my hair darker but I think it’s only the everyday magic of believing, again, at last, after a long hiatus,

that life could be

(and should be)

joyful.