So Ben is back — apparently we hung out on his secret birthday, which is what happens when I don't check Facebook. My birthdays.txt file grows ever larger.

Yesterday he drove Jenna, Jess, and Our Bold Hero to Ol' Mex for their famous two-for-ones. Is that my favorite bar here? Maybe. Probably definitely when I can no longer walk to all the bars by our current apartment.

Speaking of things I haven't done enough: I need to drink more girlie drinks. There was an... incident in Chicago that put me off of them, but it is summer and they are delicious.

I don't want to live in a world where enjoying something tasty makes me less of a man.

Probably I've said that before, but it's hard to do. When I'm actually at the bar, it takes a lot of concentration just to avoid blurting out "Honeyweise!"

I'm all over this: Operation Girlie Drink Drunk is a-go.

The conversation turned at one point to our own personal Five-Year Plans (h/t Stalin). No huge surprises there, really — I plan to just continue climbing the editing ladder (envision that!) and doing various fulfilling things on the side &mdash but planning that far out is... disorienting.

Supposedly the mere act of having a plan will make you more successful.

Jess' plan featured travel and adventure, and made me slightly jealous. If my mystery shopping editing job had paid me what my current job does, I might have become an editing hobo, following the wi-fi hotspots from town to town. I could still do something similar, sans the bindle, but then again I could probably be just as happy staying here and editing.

It's strange that some college seniors worry about finding something to do right after college when the real problem is picking something.

Once you have some economic stability — fairly easy to get, if you can swallow your principles and mentally separate "first job out of college" from "career — it's easy to get paralyzed by the sheer number of options available. There are so many different things you could be doing (or trying to do) and each choice leads down a different road, vanishing as it nears the horizon.

The mere fact that time passes lends the whole situation a sort of urgency.

I've spent a fair bit of time thinking about what I want to do in life — the specifics are a bit too personal for general consumption here — and the process of figuring that out, cutting the deadwood from my options, continues to be relaxing. For example, I'm glad to have discovered that I have no interest in teaching at a four-year college; that's the kind of revelation that gets more expensive the longer you put it off.

Even at the macro level, I still have many good choices, and this kind of broad self-conception doesn't have the Five-Year Plan's immediacy or level of detail. Who I want to be working for and where I want to be working in five years, three years, two years: no idea. I'm functioning within something more like a three-month timeframe; for now I'm just happy that I can pay my expenses, entertain myself, and be around to water my plants.