Quick one to Alice: I reckon I’d suffer fewer professional crises if I had already sampled what other sectors have to offer, like you have. You have a degree of certainty which I won’t experience unless I … well … you know ….

So– I’m just putting this out there, no real sense of whether it works– perhaps the depth of the on-the-ledge moment is actually the true barometer itself. For how much you care. For how much you invest. For how much you will learn from being in the dark. For your willingness to go there in the first place.

Is happiness or enjoyment, in the end, a fairly superficial means of judging whether one is doing one’s job properly?…

And now I will drown some kittens. Excuse me.

During college I called home once or twice a week. This year it’s every day on my way to and from school. (That’s right, I’m talking to my parents twice a day.) The worse the day, the longer I need to debrief and the more likely I am to call a friend to distract me from planning the next day.

The ironic part is that I hated talking on the phone through high school.

This is not only personal pleasure reading, but lots of reading to keep up with kids—either to read what they are (Twilight is so. freakishly. good.), but also to stay ahead of them in order to make recommendations. Since the beginning of the winter break last December, I’ve read 12 YA books (thanks to Anobii to keeping track for me).