gloomy joe quote of the day

I've been doing a lot of soul searching over the past two days. And mostly it's really made me fairly miserable, I have to say. But it's also provoked some interesting thinking and correspondence with friends. My favorite thing I said today was in an e-mail to an old friend from grad school:

When in our youths we make rash vows about casting aside mediocrity at every opportunity, I think it's in part because we don't realize that mediocrity is very, very comfortable.