The name of this blog is "third-of-a-life crisis." I am 33 years old, and I am not questioning my purpose on earth. In fact, I think that I have a fairly purposeful life -- I have a good job with upwardly-mobile potential at a small college (which I'll refer to as Winfield to avoid having my comments picked up by Google Alerts) where my colleagues largely appreciate me, I chair the board at a local domestic violence agency where people thank me for my work a lot, I have a wonderful, loving husband, good hobbies, generous parents, friends, and a very silly dog.

I am sort of ashamed to admit that I have a problem unique to relatively bright (but not noticeably brilliant) upper middle class white people -- an almost paralyzing fear of the possibility of regret and unfulfilled potential. Not that I know what I want to do or should be doing. I am just scared of not doing the unidentified excited, thrilling, fulfilling things I could have done.

Pathetic, isn't it? But the feeling is almost desperate. I want to have the kind of life that normal people envy. I want to be fabulous and smart and skilled; I want to be daring and brave and talented; I want to be meaningful and valued and irreplaceable. And yet I am completely terrified to try to be any of these things. Conversely, I don't want to smother myself with work. I don't want to be responsible for organizations of any scale. I am compulsively risk adverse. I have one central skill which I exercise involuntarily and at the worst moments -- convincing myself that the little reasons a particular plan for greatness might fail are overwhelming enough to fail to try.

Things I like doing:

• Traveling
• Reading about European history
• Knitting
• Looking at the "undressed" column on MSN
• Thumbing through fashion magazines trying to figure out what my look is and worrying about whether or not I'm too old
• Shopping (por supuesto)
• Playing with my dog
• Napping

Hmmmm. What do you suppose we call this? It's not a napolean complex . . . I aspire to a napolean complex . . .