Earth Day came and went with little notice this week. There was a time in the early 90's where I would be on the Earth Day organizing committee on campus manning an action alert booth in the student union, urging other students to help save Northern timber wolf habitat. Now I'm printing up dozens of single-sided drafts of the documents I'm editing at work, only to mark them up and throw them away in a recycling bin of questionable destination. It's a bit easier to remember Earth Day when you're working in a wildlife refuge instead of an urban setting.

I landed here in DC at a moment where I needed a big gay population to swim through. I had spent far too much time on the steppes in a former gulag settlement, on a wildlife refuge in Alaska known for its remoteness, or at college in Central Wisconsin. I needed to try myself at some big gay wildlife refuge for a change. Even back then, I had the wisdom to know my home didn't need to be the cliche gay American destinations of New York City or San Francisco. I had spent some time in San Francisco, and had deemed it to be 'too much' even after only a year of being out. I still feel that way about both cities.

Today the biggest treasure I possess in DC is my friends, not the gay community at large. My friends are probably the only things keeping me here. I can't envision living anywhere else right now anyway. There's a gay ghetto in any big city, with different demographics of course. Here, most of my friends have a degree, if not a Masters' or a J.D.. They've all traveled somewhere outside the U.S. They're smart and have opinions other than where 'the' place to shop is. Sounds snobby and pretentious, but that's the kind of person I like to hang out with.

But lately the urban setting has been getting to me. The noise, bad air, crackwhores, pushy people and the skyrocketing cost of living. Why am I here? Am I happy here? One of my unmet goals was to find a relationship, or at least try my hand at one. I felt that moving into a big city with a big, educated, well-traveled gay population would increase my chances of finding a relationship. That having been done and failed, I often find myself questioning my need to be in a city at all. If I can't find a relationship in the city after seven years, it's obvious my chances never really increased by moving into the city. While gay men in rural settings are desperate, lonely and emotionally underdeveloped; gay men in urban settings are preoccupied with who's next, and aren't all that emotionally developed either.

And my current job hasn't been all that rewarding as of yet. I had a brief time enjoying my former career as a webmaster, but didn't know how good I had it at the time. I squandered my skills, position and paycheck to live for the moment. Now I feel my current job has me wallowing in mediocrity. I'm not doing something I'm passionate about, and it's important to me to feel involved and interested with my work at hand.

These thoughts have me thinking about my current life, and what I could be doing in the future. Further education is certainly on the horizon. But first I pay off all debts, then get going on schooling. I'm thinking environmental policy or coastal ecology at nearby Maryland universities. Then after that, I'll go the Jimbo Way by seeing where life takes me. I no longer feel compelled to live in the city anymore, and I'm concerned about the rising cost of living here. So if rural life calls, I'll give it another shot. This time with a different outlook.