Ash and I went out a few days ago to exchange my faulty Palm Vx, which he bought me for my birthday but had never quite worked right... the charge lasted about a day. Now, I'm in no postision to criticise technology. In San Francisco I have Replay TV, DVD player, VCR, G4 desktop, color printer and scanner, a portable mp3 player for the gym and an mp3 server for the house. And a titanium G4 laptop is being built for me as we speak. Here in Cambridge I have TiVo, DVD player, bigass TV, and cute little ruby iMac. I have a website, numerous email addresses, and now my Palm Pilot keeps all my dates and shopping lists for me. It's all Ashley's fault; before I met Ashley, I had never used email. I
This week has gradually improved. I'm actually kind of excited about a project I'm working on which I could scarcely even think about last week. I feel more like my old self. But I was explaining to Ash last night over drinks and a nice dinner, how I haven't felt settled down here. I was trying to come up with an analogy for my feeling. I chose this: it's like when you get on the bus, and there's a seat, but you don't take it because you're only going two stops. Yesterday I bought a used bike. Most everyone rides bikes around Cambridge; the narrow, mostly one-way streets and passages of Cambridge's city centre are not very hospitable to automobile traffic -- not that I own or would venture d
I am thinking about my own inauthenticity here. It's not hard, when revealing oneself, to devise a desired impression. You simply reveal only the bits you like. A kind of "quality control". My last entry came from a place of such frustration and sense of hopelessness that preserving my dignity or engineering anyone's impression of me was utterly beside the point. I was hating myself so much that it became utterly irrelevant whether anyone else likes me or not. Not to imply that anything I write is untrue or engineered, it's just that I tend to stick with topics I feel I have a grip on. I find it difficult under normal circumstances to admit to the people around me when I'm having trouble or
This isn't one of those times when I sit down to write with a I am frustrated, mostly. I feel pummelled by mistake after mistake, showing me how naive or thoughtless or hypocritical I am. I have, in the last two weeks, said the wrong thing several times, taken the wrong approach, offended, endangered others. I can't be trusted with sensitive information; I can't gracefully repair a social situation rather than making it worse; I can't communicate with clarity without making an ass of myself in another culture. I'm afraid I've lost one friend, and I quite inadvertently set another against someone. I stumbled in a business situation requiring great diplomacy. And because it seems like one thin
