Valor, agravio y mujer

I am reading/devouring novels/plays/poetry/criticism. The time has come.

I think I would like to read some more US American literature from the first half of the 20th century or the second half of the 19th century. I would like to know more about the Civil War, the Great Depression, the pioneers. I would like to read Dickens and some good Russian novels. I would like to learn more about the Spanish Civil War and make time for a few more works of Shakespeare. I would like to immerse myself in some French naturalism (Zoile, perhaps).

There are so many possibilities.

I would like to travel, see America--and beyond. Go on a long road trip: New England in the dog days of summer, the Southwest in the early spring, even all the way down into Mexico at some point. Maybe camp along the way. To spend a few days in a forest would be nice. Or out on the ocean. Or on a beach somewhere warm but not hot, maybe a large, cool lake. I would like to stay here and not travel at all, but simply walk everywhere I need. I want to have a big cookout, maybe with a keg of beer on the side, play softball and sweat. I want to sit and talk and laugh until there are tears in my eyes with good friends, new or old or both. I want to go where I don't know the language at all, taste a new taste that I had never known existed. Is that possible? I think it is, still. I would like to be mixed in a crowd of faces I have never seen before nor will ever see again, just for a few hours, perhaps. And I want to be surrounded by faces that I have known in every light, faces that I know better than my own.

I want to do everything and nothing, both at the same time. Because life is so short. And beautiful. And everything in between.

And why should I have to choose?

I choose to contradict myself.