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I used to think that the worst thing that could happen to me was having to move back in with my parents. Since I'm going to be living with my parents once again, I'm going to have to revise that and say that living with my parents is not the worst thing that could happen to me. My daddy dying is the worst thing that could happen to me. Or having to live in an igloo and wear smelly animal skins and have to kill my own meat. That sounds like it would definitely be the worst thing that could happen to me. This is just a layover on the way to something better happening. Or something worse, I haven't decided yet. For now I'm going with better. But if this ends up with my being mauled by a bear, then it was definitely not for the better. Unless that ends up in a tv movie of the week being made in my honor, which would be pretty cool. I wonder who would play me? I want to say Keri Russell during the beginning of Felicity before she went nutty and cut off her hair because her hair is curly and so is mine, and she's not working right now, so she's available for tv movies.

Yea, I just rambled into something weird. My point with all this is that my biggest fear is not spiders or heights or tiny dirty spaces, its failure. Specifically failing at life, and living with my parents always seemed to signal that to me. Mostly because I spent pretty much my entire life dreaming about the day when I wouldn't have to live with them (no joke one of my very first memories is of weighing the pros and cons of running away at around 3). But in a very round about way this is good. I'm facing my fear head on. I could stay here in Erie, until I got a job and a place to live since for all his faults and his current asshole-ness Andy is a good human being and would let me stay here since you know at one point he really did love me. But I don't want to stay here. And that's a conscious decision that I'm making. Some people live their entire lives and never face their fears. I've never met any of these people, but I'm sure they exist. Beyond that though this is good because I'm not running away from my fear of failure by going to grad school or law school as a way to postpone adulthood or having to decide what I want to do with my life, I'm choosing to really sit there in the shit of it and just figure it out. And so what if I'm going to be figuring it out with my daddy by my side, there are worse things in life than that. Even I know that.

More than that though I'm going to argue that its impossible to fail at life at 22. Unless you're a former child star, and you've already peaked, there's a whole lot more years left to figure things out and not fail. What's failing at life really? What standard am I using? I'm not failing because I'm not getting married, because that's never been my goal in life. Not having a job is a wee bit failure like but that's only temporary, not the entirety of my life. I did graduate from college, that was a pretty good accomplishment. So yea, I haven't had a chance to fail at life yet. I'm just a kid. And I'm just going home. And its 80 degrees there, and that sounds awful good right about now.

Ok, now while you make sense of all that here are some links:

* "Being twentysomething is always a good excuse for borderline alcoholism." --Maggie, 21

* This week bummed me out, so I don't want to get into the whole immigration thing. You can read a good little roundout of the whole thing here from slate and here from salon. Oh and a good catholic take here.

* What Bush Really Meant (not what he said), a very amusing concept for a blog. Don't believe me? This is the tagline for the blog: "Bush thinks God talks to him. I think Bush talks to me. We're both wacko." Ok, now go read it.

* I really interesting article on procrastination, which I started reading but didn't finish, but will totally finish, eventually, at some point. via lifehacker, my current blog obsession.

* "How to write a thank you note". also via lifehacker.

* "I hate tumors" an article about someone's friend who died at 28 from cervical cancer that hit me in the gut and that you should read too. Its short and good. On a vaguely related note, I used to loooove Jane and read it religiously during high school, since we shared the same odd sense of humor and obsession with fashion until I realized that for all their talk about real women's bodies they never put any real women in their high fashion shoots, which was the reason I stopped reading them. This article makes me want to give them another shot though.

* I've always been inexplicably drawn to LL Cool J. Maybe not so inexplicably, its probably those abs. Plus I like his music, its catchy and summer-y and good to dance to. Anyways, in a very fun read Slate attempts to figure out how he's managed to survive for so long.

* And finally McSweeney's brings you the very best resume ever. Go read it now.