My sister called me from JFK airport today. She was waiting for her flight to leave for Ireland, which was supposed to leave from O'hare, which was where she was going to meet my Mom, and they were going to fly together for their horse riding trip. She wanted to tell me that she loved me, because she was about to get on a fourteen hour international flight.

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I sat on the bed and sat on the bed. A little heavy from the frozen pizza I had eaten for dinner, I thought about what I could be doing, something active like shooting baskets or going for a bike ride. I continued to sit and my thoughts drifted to teaching, and the chapbook I have been working to assemble. I got up and smoked a cigarette and sat back down on the bed with Brian's "Before Starting Over", taking particular interest in his writing about Silliman's blog.

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Adam had brought up the issue, seemingly in passing, that I "wanted to be a poet", during whatever conversation what were having. Which strikes a nerve in the sense that if this is my ambition, I'm sorry that my ambition is so naked. The assertion implying that I'm not one already, that I'm trying to become.

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It strikes the same kind of nerve as the nerve that gets struck when the issue of "working hard" comes up amongst my old group of friends. Inductively, again, the insecurity leads me to conclude that I'm not working hard enough. Jake had told me that I was the slowest and laziest painter he had ever worked with. I responded that that was

impossible.