I get lost reading old things, sifting through the shoeboxes of the past. Other peoples', my own – it doesn't matter. I find emails from five years ago and marvel at all they contain, all the hopes and ideas and forgotten memories. People belittle the email for not being as romantic as the old handwritten letter, but it has its merits. Email preserves reams of information, recording the minutia of life in a way letters did not. My old inbox contains information about bills and loans and stuff bought and sold, apartments sought and rented, relationships come and gone, friendships that remain (in varying degrees of closeness), jobs applied for and successes and failures. There's a lot in there, suspended in the great void of the World Wide Web. It is a web indeed, one that catches the history of our lives and preserves it indefinitely, encrypted for posterity. I wonder if research historians in hundreds of years will mine the web for scraps of emails and receipts that tell the story of what it was like to live in 2012. I wonder if one of them will unearth the contents of my Gmail inbox, marveling at it like an archeologist picking away at a block of sand.

From my inbox, I see that I've applied to be an organic garden intern, a dog musher, a 'backcountry intern,' a teacher, a copywriter and editor, a trail builder, a newspaper reporter, a wilderness guide, a hut caretaker, an education director, a communications director, a project manager and a research assistant in at least eight countries and 12 states.

When are they going to find out?, I wonder. When will they discover that I will do anything, go anywhere, just to get a taste of this life, to feed this spark in my belly, to feel alive and free, to have stories to tell? That there isn't anything that doesn't appeal to me: I would be a truckstop diner waitress in Indiana, a war correspondent in Afghanistan, a SCUBA dive instructor in Indonesia. I am not “focused.” My imagination runs everywhere, ignoring borders and gates and that annoying concept of the “real world” that seems to get in the way of dreams and then is revealed to be the dream itself. I forget the rejections. I keep going. I am convinced, against all rationale, that there is something out there for me that's real, real good.