It seems I'll be able to pay the rent, which I was worried about for a while. I've never had to ask my folks for support of that kind, and I'm rather proud of this. In spite of looming debt and suchlike, I'm still supporting myself. I could probably do a lot better when it comes to money, but then it turns out I really don't care as long as I have enough to get by and have a little fun.

Coming up in NYU, it was a definite difference between me and most of my peers, where we got our spending money from, how we paid the bills. The whole experience made me a little classist, and I've continued to carry that consciousness with me outside of college. When I go back home, it strikes me only now how class played into the social dynamics of my earlier years. Back in high school, I really didn't know or care who was rich and who wasn't. I didn't really know who was a Republican and who was a Democrat. Now I go back and I see who was and who is, and I wonder if it was really all that idylic, or if I was just oblivious. Not that it takes up a lot of my time, but it is something that I notice.

Just trying to keep it real. I'm busy and not really operating at 100%. The latest Strong Bad Email is a good one though. I just got a pair of hasslin' glasses similar to SB's Dangeresque shades.

Well, anything resembling vacation has now drawn to a close for me. The last of the monkeys left The Jungle (a.k.a. Luke'n'Kim's house on the Oakland/Berkeley border) this morning, and it's back to life, back to reality here in the Bay. I like the scenery here; the smell of the air, the palm trees. I bought some sunglasses and an old rusty french road bike -- the last of my disposable income for a while. The only missing piece is a coffee grinder. I have a big bag of beans courtesy of my mother, but the only means for preparing them in this kitchen is a mideval mortar and pestle set. Anyone who doubts the debilitating addictive force that caffeine can exude should have seen me this morning, pesling away to get my AM fix.

And so the Summer of the Hassle rolls on; hopefully on smoother tracks now. Last night watched films and ate pizza; kind of a suitable comedown from the past three weeks frenetic pace. The 25th Hour (a.k.a. "Spike Lee Loves America!") was enjoyable, with some really stellar moments. Lee does have an amazing appreciation for, understanding of, and ability to convey the spirit of New York City. The movie caused me to miss it quite a bit; the energy, the jive, the fact that it's the capital of the world, that it is the fucking future writ large: steaming, humping, race-mixing, debauchering, loving, nurturing bitch-goddess and everything. I think she's due for a big comeback in the next few years -- a little less yupification and a lot more community, please.

It made me think a little about 9-11 again, which I haven'd done in a long time, and I hit upon what might be a good meme for describing terrorism and how to combat it; imagine terrorism as a really really egregious hate crime. Think about it: Al-Qaeda blowing up the World Trade Center has a lot more in common with KKK-people burning black churchs than it does with the Nipponese attacking Pearl Harbor. It wasn't a tactical act of war, it was an act of symbolism, though nontheless deadly or tragic in its direct consequence. Pearl Harbor was about the destruction of a fleet and a strategic oil reserve and emperial dominion over the Pacific rim. The attack on the WTC was a massive, homicidal "fuck you!"

The means of addressing and preventing said events are very different, and they also map with the analogy. The threat of invasion by foreign power can be deterred and contained though having a strong defense network; terrorism (be it the international or local church-arson variety) cannot be addressed in this way. In fact, it cannot be defended against in any conventional fashion short of instituting a complete police, and planting the seeds of a guerrilla/civil war. A free society is forever vulnerable, which is what makes freedom so valuable and precious. It don't come easy, and if you want to keep it you have to be strong enough to know that bad people will be able to get to you no matter how many walls you build. If you doubt this I invite you to examine the measures Israel has taken to defend itself from terrorism through conventional means. Ain't working so hot, eh?

The only way to be safer from terrorism is to make sure people don't feel like doing it; to make sure that people don't really want to burn down black churches or symbolic skyscrapers, and that even if they do it is such a universally dispised act that there's nothing to be gained by doing it. We were very close to that with 9-11; but the actions taken by this administration since then have squandered the opportunity to cement world opinion against any such acts. Perhaps all is not yet lost. Perhaps we can change our tune nationally and plead temporary insanity due to extreme grief and stress. Perhaps we can come clean to the international community and really get down to the business of dealing with out issues.

Terrorists (like church-burners) need to be hauled before the light of justice so that all can understand and agree upon their guilt. It is the only way to eradicate them as individuals without prepetuating the crimes they commit. We must create a global legal framework that unites the entire civilized world, every nation and every people, against terrorism, but here's a free clue: unilateral invasion of unrelated nations isn't it. What the US has done in Iraq vis-a-vis the "War on Terror" would be like the NAACP and the FBI teaming up and going down to the South in response to a church burning and busting every hunting club, shitkicker bar and antique shop that might have any confederate-era paraphernalia. Sure you're nominally going after mostly "bad guys," but in doing so with little specific just cause and in an agressive and indiscriminate fashion, you only inflame the issues you seek to address. Such beligerance invites reciprocity.

Maybe I'll develop that a little more later. There are some flaws (e.g. the power dynamic doesn't map), but I think the core notion might be a keeper. Anyway, Spike Lee loves New York City, as do almost all free people in the world. As do I. I'm glad to be here in California, but I'm ready for another go-round when I return.

Arrival in the Bay Area feels princely. I slept last night in a real bed for the first time since leaving NYC. I took a lengthy and hot shower. I shaved. I put on some nice clothes and I'm going to a wedding party where there will be amazing amounts of free food and bevvy; out for a jaunt in Oakland I am. Still frustrated at times, but feeling better and better now that I've Named the Beast. Yessir, it's 2003 and this is the summer of the hassle.

I'm about to jump in a car bound for the East Bay. I'm feeling better about life in general after venting a little bit to a couple of different lady friends. It's ironic that I've been so frustrated by my friend's communication breakdowns, and that in the midst of all my frustration I've not been able to talk to them about it. "It's like raaaaaaain, on your wedding day..." Ok, let's not start that shit.

So life is still pretty beautiful and all. I'm still pretty lonely most of the time, but today it feels more like that warm comfortable melancholy rather than a swirling, sucking eddy of dispair. Everything moves in waves, and this one will turn itself around in time.

I'm sitting here in a bunker-like office at the U of O -- a little spot with a desk lamp and ethernet my mom hooked me up with, used to be a bathroom but now it's an intern pen -- kind of holed up with myself. It's lonesome in this town, nothing doing and nowhere to fit. Every place that's going-on is another scene, and I'm just blowing through. Never been much of one for the scene anyway.

I've been mulling over a lot as of late. Feeling pretty vulnerable these days; raw, lonely, confused. I suppose that's part of being on the rebound. Am I on the rebound? I don't really know. I'm on something.

I know things move in cycles and I know what this one feels like. Rewind 18 months and press play, click here and read up. Nice to know could turn a phrase back then. But what the hell is going on with me right now?

I know that looking women in the eyes is hard, pretty much no matter who they are. I know that when I was out at the Country Fair this past weekend I had some major issues with opening up. There was this almond-eyed beauty I kept seeing, some kind of mythological creature, and it felt like high school in a real bad way. I put off weird vibes these days. I'm afraid of touching people. I'm sexually repressed (again). I have a lot of unaddressed/unaddressable needs. I feel tired a lot; physically, mentally, emotionally. I know I feel like crying still and I know I'm not really letting that happen. I know I can't keep doing this for very much longer.

I know that I miss Sasha, but I don't know if that's just because I'm super lonely or because of something greater. I know that I feel kind of like a looser; that I have a hard time having fun; that I don't know where the dream is leading me, or if there even is a dream anymore. I kind of want to cram it all and go back to New York now, but I know that's not really a possibility.

I know I need to make a break. I'm going outside for a while to warm up and think some sexy thoughts.

I'm back from a long weekend offline. It was good. I have 238 emails to answer and a lot to catch up on, so if you're waiting to hear from me it might be a while. It seems that the much anticipated Dean - Lessig blog confluence happened. Here's the slashdot, which I've not read yet but will skim to see how it reads in the geek world. I'm glad to have been a very small part of setting that in motion, but the major kudos belong to Britt for being the first (the first I know of) to bring the idea up, and Zacker for hitting the iLaw and pressing the flesh.

The weekend was valuable. It wasn't a pleasure-fest, but I didn't expect it to be. There was a lot of digesting to be done, many lessons learned and a few ideas found. I am the tent. I'll write it all up as a feature sometime in the coming weeks; after I write up my interview with my Air Force friend. Time to hit the ground running.

Out here at the OCF... trying to put the theory into practice. It's hard hard hard work, but maybe worth it; we'll see.

Right now I'm reading Linked: The New Science of Social Networks by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. It's cracking good stuff. Reminds me of some of the things I was writing in my little handmade journal this past spring, thinking about how people's media/news/information network informs their political awareness and general personhood. One thing the book has not addressed in all it's talk of egalitarianism and so forth is reciprocity in linkage. That is to say, in reality, all links are not equal: some are one-way streets, others are bi-directional. In most human relationships, it's a balance between the two. A real solid scientific analysis of interpersonal links would have to view them as vectors, but I'd settle for something that could take into account binary (one-way/two-way) directionality.

A few examples; someone who works a room, gladhanding with a message can make contact with 100 people. But that will be 100 one-way links unless this person happens to actually absorb something from someone else in the process of all the palm-pressing. The likelyhood that this person actually absorbs as much as they put out from all 100 of the people in the room is close to nil. Consumers purchasing the same products are all on the recieving end of a link. Web sites linking to internet "hubs" like Yahoo or Amazon are on the giving end. Thinking politically, it's not hard to see how television news and talk radio are largely uni-directional links; the proportion of viewers watching the show to viewer emails displayed on Wolf Blitzer must run into the 5th order of magnitude.

It would seem that egalitarianism and democracy in networks is contingent on some critical mass of bi-directional linkage. For all these reasons and more, I like our chances with the net. It's becoming more diverse and hard to define out here, in spite of all the commercial encroachment. Participation is on the rise. While there are still "hubs" and "connectors" and mega-popular power-law sites, there's also a lot of actual community forming out here as well; dense and lively clusters of voices which both individually and collectively represent a vibrant society.

Ok, the new design is now site-wide. It makes some of the pages look a little wonky... I like big pictures and they don't work too well with the new layout, but whaddya gonna do? If you see anything really screwy, let me know.

I also peeked at my stats. I cracked 10,000 visits last month with more than 5,800 unique visitors. I figure that means most people stopped in more than once, which is kind of nice. I've been at this for close to two years now, and it does make me feel good. Hopefully it makes you feel good too.