Pusillanimous

Pusillanimous: having or showing a shameful lack of courage

There's a challenge floating around online to live with only 100 personal possessions. It sounds marvelous. I feel so constantly weighted down with things and school and books for school and business attire and heavy, heavy things. I'm making a list tonight of the 100 things I would take if I could leave. And of course the "if I could" is a lie, since I choose every day to stay here.

I saw Eat, Pray, Love tonight with J. It was wonderful or awful, depending on how you look at it. If nothing else, it made me want to get in my car and drive away. I've had this urge before, getting stronger and stronger lately, but I'm too much of a weak coward to actually do it. If I could wake up one morning with the courage, I would just be gone. Take my hundred things and a full tank of gas and find out exactly how far I could get and see where I would end up.

I despise the voice in my head that reminds me that this is a cliche, that extent of the idea's unoriginality is as vast as the landscape into which I would escape if I could. I hate that nasty little voice because it's right: this is a cliche, the dream of a college kid younger than I am, the mundane abhorrence of materialism and capitalism and ism-ism and so on and so forth in a long and sustained war of attrition against whatever passes for a "hippie" these days, or a happy person, because the critics are all pusillanimous idiots who must resort to comforting themselves with their own jackassary. So there.

I am making a list of 100 things. I am starting with that. And I know that I will still be here in the morning and the great Something Else will still have to wait for me. But I am starting with this. I'm starting.