In life you pick sides. Oh, you might not mean to, but it happens. Naturally, consciously, unconsciously. Would you necessarily trust yourself as a college kid to make some of those choices? Well, why not? One thing leads to another.

The important thing is not to be down on yourself for those choices. You are, after all, in situations with other people who are making their own choices. Thus a certain anarchy, of people making their choices according to their own tastes, to the inside parts of their own heads and their own psychology, and what can you do? You find role models, and that's what helps.

Later on in life, you'll question yourself. You'll question those choices.

Why now, to be specific, did I chose Hemingway as a personal style of life and thought? Why not a more fruitful scholarly mode at that certain time when I might have had a choice? To the literary scholar, it's like, 'come on, there's so much more than Hemingway, like Andrew Marvell, Dryden, Keats, Larkin, Eliot, Matthew Arnold, etc. etc. etc. ... why be a dolt and pick some man who writes sentences like an ogre?... How uninteresting. How sort of "stereotypical," the sort of rot that comes out of him, the bravado... "The horse smelled the water" Christ, who gives a turd?'

And then you can go on living apologizing for your basic biology and life rhythms. You can conclude that your whole way of living isn't valid. This is not helpful. You are who you are. You live in ways that work for you. And, let's face it, you want to write, and there are certain ways to go about doing it, and doing so makes you feel satisfied. And after that feeling, well, then you can go and face and interact.

Buddha, completely, doesn't really seem the complete answer. There's still a you. The you has ways of functioning, habits.

What's most funny is the resistance you encounter. The complete misunderstanding on the parts of other people towards you, really, quite shamefully so, as if they expected you to be a completely different person than who you are, like they wanted you to change the color of your skin.

You can doubt your own self for only so long, and never sustained. Light cracks out. You remember yourself. You wake, and feel good.