I want I want I want.

Sometimes I want to plummet into the depths of despair, selfishly sucking people down to the abyss with me -- and then rocket back into the stratosphere of life's limerence, do something irrational, irreverent and irresponsible and other irr-things without stuff like student loans, marriage, dinner, economy, efficiency and effectiveness automatically and promptly popping into my analytical, educated, thoroughly dictionarial mind.

I want to get stuck, sometimes. I want to worry and mope and scream my defiance at something. I want to protect myself.

But... I am surrounded by love, affection, appreciation. It's thrown at me from all sides like roses upon a stage, and I don't even have to perform. Most mornings, among the first words I hear upon waking up are "you are beautiful beyond all imagining." Lucky girl. Now it's time for me to thoroughly accuse myself of subconsciously having something to prove... Look at meee! I DO have a dark side, see? Look how dark it is! But wait, don't get the wrong idea - I'm a fine, upstanding citizen, and beautiful, and successful. ::snirk:: LOSER PANTS!

I spend my time panning for gold. A lot of what I find is fools' gold, but I put it up for sale, hoping you're fooled. The jewels are there, but I sometimes ignore them. I sift through the rushing water, picking through the common dirt, adding my own chemicals to the outflow, polluting it. Thoroughly knowing the nature of the metals and minerals that I hoard, I've already tallied up their values.

I'd much rather gaze into a tidepool. Full of mysteries, lacking any mechanism to discover them any faster than they naturally reveal themselves - if they are ever revealed at all. Concealing not lifeless rocks with their human-assigned values, but little flashes of life itself, hiding and emerging and coming and going with the tides.