Christmas has come, and gone, and now it is the day after, all artifice stripped from that most commodified of holidays in the frantic aftermath of exchange and supersale, the malls teeming, the only imminent change now the onset of temporary hopefulness proferred by the night of greatest inebriation, which will be followed by the morning of greatest hangover. And so perhaps I can be forgiven for a lack of holiday enthusiasm at the moment, though my Christmas was merry enough, a day of parents and nephews and needed winter coats, and then finally the sort of feast that oversates and ensures the need for New Year's resolutions regarding waistline. Not a bad day, but I couldn't shake the sense that the world is moving while I stand still. In the morning, before I went to my parent's house, I went by Starbucks, the only open coffee vendor, and ran into an old friend from high school who lives now in Oakland, a loudspoken and assertive Jew who's the daughter of the local Rabbi.

"Are you visiting?" she asked. "What are you doing? What's new?"

Because I have come past the point where I can use the line about doing the same things the same ways and expecting different results, one of many definitions of insanity, I shrugged.

She went on to offer some good advice concerning single-minded pursuit of success, perhaps not really realizing that single-minded pursuit is the one thing I do well. She meant well. She was right to suggest I move South to sunnier climes. What I most took away, in the pre-coffee blur, was her energy and conviction and the sense that she, at least, was away doing while I stay, sustaining. Not her fault or intention, but the way I feel nonetheless. When I went out last night with my brother, the one open bar was full of people he went to high school with who'd come back for the holidays, but there was not a single person from my high school years-- people in their thirties have begun to establish their own families and to have other obligations beyond the town they were born in.

"Come to the Bay," my friend said, "and I'll set you up with all my single friends."

I smiled and thanked her. Not an offer I'm likely to take up, but she had one thing undeniably right: the need to move, the inevitability now. There is only so long I can afford to stay still, to walk the same streets bound the same places, knowing already the way the hours will pass. As my friend Leo London asks in his saddest song, how long? How far?