Someone rather innocuously asked me what I wanted in a woman tonight; I didn't say what I really wanted because they weren't really interested in my answer. If I had, though, I would have said that I want a woman who understands that I've chosen to devote large swaths of my life to staring down some of the worst that humankind has to offer because I (perhaps naively) believe that I can help some of the people who have been victimized by it to some extent, and that, as a result, there will be some nights when I come home and I won't know how to process some of the horrible things I bore witness to that day -- like the kid who spreads his own feces around the edges of the bathroom, and no one knows why, until we find out that he was often sexually molested in the bathroom at his home and that spreading his waste around was the only way to keep those who abused him away, so now he simply does that instinctively. What I want, on one level, is a woman who understands that this is the life I've chosen, and that it will take a toll on me.

But even more than that, what I want is to be able to come home on one of those nights when I wonder what the point of anything is -- when I wonder just how in the hell we've made this world the way it is, when I wonder why it's worth even living in it anymore -- and look in her eyes, feel her body in my arms, smell her hair or perfume, and be reminded, simply by virtue of existing in that very moment with her and not by anything she has the burden of actually doing, that this is what's good in the world -- that this is why I live.

That's what I want.