It's amazing what a difference five minutes can make.

I had the perfect job lined up, I was riding high. Then I went to talk to Dr. Hendler, my soon-to-be employer about it, and it turns out he's got $400,000 locked up in some kind of beaurocratic snafu. One of the many side-effects of this state of affairs is that there is no money to hire a programmer for the lab.

I would have expected to be far more upset about the whole thing than I am.

Sure, I don't know how I'm going to buy food yet, but generally I actually feel a sense of release. There is no ready made solution. The only choice is the one I now must create for myself.

For starters, it looks like I'll probably be able to make it out to all the cool things that I want to do. I've got real motivation now to get a bodywork practice started. And I'm not going to have anyone to tell me what's important. But I should have that one figured out within the week.

The good news for you is that I'll have more time to write! Yay!

More soon.

This was originally written as an e-mail to Ginger Hoffman. We were talking about T-mobile's internet connection plan. She asked me where I was at.

Eventually I'll have a sytem that let's me integrate portions of my correspondence seamlessly into my public presence, but for now it's command-C, command-V!

Now I know
and I'm ready to go.
I'm lyrical,
but don't get hysterical.
My cell phone gonna be made from material,
yo!

My lap's got tha 'tooth that I need to connect.
I'm livin' in the future,
I got my cyberdeck.

Done with the Bean.
NYC? Already Been.
Get to know me,
in the real DC.

Hey Dupont! I gotta bum a fag!
Got the ethiop platter,
In my doggie bag.

Meetin' with the boss man, meetin' in the lab
Gonna change the world with the Semantic Web

That might work out,
But, hey, maybe not.
Anyhow, they're hirin' at the tea shop.
I loves my tea
In the real DC.

Got bodyworkers, greenies, and jugglers comin' in
A DJ collective looking for a place to spin.
They not all busy like y'all up there
Got time to do this thing
Got time for fresh air.

So when ya lookin' for a place to visit
the real DC's the genuine Dizit.

Uh huh, yeah.
I'm the real DC.

First off, let me just say that I had to leave at the butt crack of dawn from San Francisco. Now, I suppose I could have gotten up 1.5 hours earlier to ensure that I had time to wait around for the dryer to finish and make the bed again. But I just couldn't manage.

Please don't let this negatively affect your decision as to whether or not I should be allowed to come stay with you some day, gentle reader.

But otherwise, Meredith makes a well reasoned case for the facts. Namely, I did stay with her, talk and cuddle only to ultimately return to my ancestral home - Maryland. I am now working on getting a job at the University of Maryland Mindswap lab and otherwise settling in to the Washington, DC area.

I have many stories remaining to tell, and as my existence shifts once again towards the virtual, you will be seeing more of them.

In the meantime, consider the vast wealth of online content currently being made available. One used to require arcane knowlege of BBS's, Usenet, or at the very least an HTML editor to share your text with the world. Now any idiot can do it using such services as LiveJournal or TypePad (I assume you are already aware of Blogger). And these idiots will refer back and forth to one another - so that you can stay within a vast conversation between a good chunk of the people that care about a subject. One place to stumble upon such conversations is within the sprawl of Paul Ford's masterpiece - Ftrain.

This is the stuff that's changing my world. And soon, I'm going to start changing it back.

And no, I don't expect you to fully appreciate the poetry of that last sentence. There are layers upon layers of obscure references to my current mental states collapsed into a single clause. But I promise I'll explain more later.