All my friends jumped off the cliff, ma, and I had to go too.

I've been holding out for years. I'm the proverbial late adopter. I started smoking more than a year after I turned 18, I never listened to punk music until I was almost twenty, and here I am in 2004 with a blog, of all things. Deep, calm breaths. This won't be anything like the time I tried to take a programming class and found myself the only person out of thirty who didn't actually care about being able to write in actual machine language. No. This will, somehow, be much more like the time I dropped out of college and ended up as a baker, surrounded by kindly older Mexican men who showed me how to make pretzels out of the dough. Undoubtedly the digital equivalent of kindly Ethiopian coworkers will offer me the digital equivalent of tasty bowls full of injera and stewed meat, and all will be well in my own little corner of the internet universe.
So I keep telling myself.

Pardon me if I pretend for a while that this isn't a high-tech medium. Pardon me if, instead, I pretend that these messages are actually being written on scrap paper, in crayon, and sealed into old green bottles with wax, and tossed into the ocean.

Well that didn't last long, did it?

I went looking for someone I used to know online, and couldn't find them. This threw me into a panic. For some irrational reason I believed that this person, whom I hadn't spoken to in who knows how long (ok, I do know how long, 2 years) had died. Of course this must be why I couldn't find them, because everyone knows that if you just google things persistently enough you can find anything. Hah! So I logged of my dial-up connection and dug out my oldest address book and called someone *else* that I hadn't talked to in 2 years, in order to verify that the first person I hadn't talked to in two years was not dead. This was ludicrous.

Elapsed time of pretending this medium is a peaceful, detached, bottle-note experience: 30 minutes.
Elapsed time of behaving like a crazed woman: 1 hour.

I think I need a cigarette.