What are the requirements for inclusion on my list? Books must be in paperback and ubiquitous enough to be found in a local library. A big bonus if they are available for the Kindle (I may only use Kindle-available books for purely selfish reasons). Oh and they must be good books, hopefully with a bit of an edge.

I’m also considering doing some kind of virtual version of the book club. Perhaps I would do it in SecondLife, or via a group in Facebook or on my message board. Sounds like fun and not that much more work since we would read the same book in the different locations.

When things start going badly, I start hearing from customers that they have lost their stuff. The things you own in Second Life, things you have bought, made or been given, only exist on the Second Life asset servers. You can’t back them up directly to your hard drive. Often you only have a single copy which you cannot even back up in Second Life. So when someone loses something it can be very upsetting. This week I’ve heard from a lot of upset people. It hasn’t been this bad in a long time.

Also, people have cut back on shopping. The week before was nearly a record week for me. This week, my business was cut in half. I don’t know if I’ve ever personally seen a week when my SL income dropped by more than 50% until now.

And then last night when I got home, eager to log in and catch up with my customer service requests, I couldn’t log in. Second Life was officially offline and had been for hours. I went to bed, woke up this morning, and tried to log in again. It appeared that it might be working again, but again I was unable to log in and soon after the same offline message appeared in the top left corner. This could be the beginning of a very serious outage.

This is the scary part of making Second Life your primary income, the knowledge that SL’s infrastructure can crumble at any moment. I suppose this is true with many types of businesses, but Second Life as a platform often still feels like it’s in beta.

I realized that I was unhappy in my administration job at the theatre where I worked, so I quit (although I kept teaching). I started winning at poker and began to think about pursuing it professionally. I found another new source of income when a hobby became a business. I left New York to spend some time with my father in Arizona, and finally I moved back to my hometown to take care of my mother. My old life has been completely interrupted.

This is not all bad. I’m very glad that I’ve been able to spend time with my family and being a caregiver for a parent does have many rewards. It’s hard not to feel a little lost at times though. Eventually, I will leave again, pick up my life and start over. And I’ll have many options in front of me.

Do I return to the theatre? If so, do I go back to Chicago, return to New York or join many of my friends in Los Angeles? Maybe I should go back to Arizona where the weather is amazing and theatre culture is still young, or perhaps I should reconnect with some of my oldest and best friends in Seattle. Do I teach for someone else like I have before or do I teach my own classes or even start my own theatre?

Part of me longs to travel, both here and abroad. Perhaps I should return to poker, hone my tournament skills and spend a year or two traveling from one tournament to another.

My business may still be doing well when it’s time to leave here, perhaps I should throw all my energy into that. I don’t think most people get several chances to build up a successful business. Second Life may peak and fall apart within the next 5 years. I should strike while the iron is hot, make as much money as I can before people move on to something else.

Still, perhaps this is the time to return to grad school. I could get an MFA in acting or directing. Perhaps teaching at a university would be great fun and a good way to spend the next twenty years or so.

But if I return to school, maybe this is the perfect opportunity to nurture a different interest. Maybe computer science is still something I could pursue and enjoy. Of course, I’m also very interested in mathematics, biology, economics, diet and nutrition, and a half a dozen other topics, so saying I’ll return to grad school only expands my options.

In part the purpose of this blog is for me to hone my sense of what things are most important to me. I know that I’m getting ready for the second big chunk of my adult life and I want it to be meaningful and satisfying. I don’t want to simply see where the wind takes me (or do I? Perhaps, that is exactly how I should spend life, hopping from opportunity to opportunity, never quite knowing where I will be five years from now).

Of course, I don’t need to decide this today or tomorrow. I think this blog will help me figure out just where my path lies when it comes time to move on to the next part of my life. You could call it a mid-life crisis, but I don’t think it is. It’s more of a mid-life pause. Life has forced me to narrow my focus, give up most of parts of what was my life temporarily. I’m determined to use it as an opportunity.