Jody's Self-Pity Corner: I'm starting to feel old and senile. I turn 26 in a month and I'm at a strange crossroads. My writing now is the best it's ever been -- I've figured out how to be both formal and impulsively imagistic without skewing too much in either direction, and I finally feel that I write like an adult and not merely a petulant/careerist twentysomething. But now that I care about words to the point where I'll labor over a single phrase for an hour to keep it from seeming insincere, overhyperbolic, or amateurish, I'm finding that the act of writing gives me a lot less pleasure than it used to; it can be torture trying to drag an honest opinion out of myself these days. I love writing and I feel terribly guilty that I can't live up to the "a writer writes, always" ethos (cf. Throw Momma From the Train), but every time I fire up MS Word and search my inner rockcrit for a snazzy hook, it's not there, and all the time spent not writing leads me to believe that I'm not a writer, only an inarticulate boob, an artless plebe. The night was... uh.