It is a blustery, blowing night outside my second floor window. The streetlamps make everything golden, masking the frigid air with warm glows. I am not so easily fooled. Or maybe I am.

I say to a friend recently, that we do things sometimes with the mindset that it is not an adventure, that it is life and a choice and there is no opting out when the fun stops. I think that driving to work, driving anywhere really, nearly everyday during the winter. That I've chosen to live in a cold place where it snows and where temperatures regularly fluctuate 50 degrees. Last week I scraped an inch of ice off of my car with red and chapped hands, nearly crying because it was so cold it hurt. I wore a sweatshirt today. As the door to the print shop closed behind me I heard the manager call out to stay warm, it's going to be a cold one tomorrow. I am indifferent.

Because I've chosen life here. It isn't some choose my own adventure story, write your own history, take risks, live life on the edge sort of life. It's just normal: I pay my bills and have a lease and car insurance and coffee maker and run out of toilet paper on occasion. There is no backdoor.

One friend accuses me of the working-class mindset and another says I've beat the system, the first college graduate in a family of creative-do-it-yourselves. I couldn't do it on my own, I thought I needed a degree, I guess.

This morning I scan websites, journalism programs, masters in communication degrees, something, anything. Not to get away from here, I've chosen life here and I like it. But to feel like there is something lurking beneath that has to get out. Something to be said, something to be done, something, anything! It's not the doing of something, I think, that will make the difference. It's the knowledge that there is something to be done.

I think this happens every January. I am tired of White, white, white and cold. But I think it takes me by surprise, perhaps more every year. Because as much as I've chosen it here, it always feels like it's chosen me instead.