"The cure for everything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea." Isak Dinesen

I got home at 8 last night, at the end of a long, duty-filled week, worn out by the sense of how much of what I do feels like pushing a rock up a hill, or swimming against an inevitable tide of discouragement. And no one to talk to about it. I changed my Facebook status to "lonely," tried to read some Alice Munro, gave up and cried myself to sleep.

This morning I slept and slept and slept, crawled out of the covers around 11, made myself coffee and opened my computer to a few friendly messages waiting for me on Facebook. I ate my breakfast and clicked through my friend Andrea's blog, ran across her link to Donald Miller - an author I'was reading a lot of in the years before coming to Lithuania - which led me to The Burnside Writer's Collective, and their companion blog. Which led me to their links page which then led me to what quickly became my latest blog crush (shssh, don't tell him), which is why it is now almost 2 p.m. and I'm still in my bathrobe, the dishwater has gone cold in the sink, and I'm working on my third cup of coffee and wondering if those thoughts I was having last night - about getting myself out of this exhausting teaching profession and throwing my lot in with the starving writers of the world - may actually be worth paying attention to. Granted, while there is little money and no recognition in teaching, there is even less money and marginal recognition in writing, but I'd get to spend quite a bit more time in my pajamas!