It's not just FoRK, though, that I'm abdicating -- no more book reviews or
clippings from the technical media or technological rants about
convergent technology -- it's my entire intellectual life.
In short, the VOID may be filling up, but at the cost of melting my
brain.
More than half, perhaps two thirds of my days go by now worrying about
people and my relationships, non-relationships, and
dysfunctional-relationships with them. HTTP has just fallen out the
window. I can't say I like it, but I can't deny I took a fork in the
road, and I can't take it back.
For now, at least, I have committed myself to developing some skills
and empathy and, frankly, chasing the fairer sex. It's just hard for my
monitor circuits to watch me drop so many other exciting ideas on the floor.
Of course, in true Techer style, I'm learning at what I might modestly call a
prodigious rate. In a single weekend, for example, I had to define or redefine
six different relationships, all very hackeyed archetypal patterns, but it's
still news to me.
The corrollary criticism I'm getting from all sides is that in this headlong
rush, I'm multitasking my real friends into a tizzy. There are lots of little
slights arund the edges of a to-the-max schedule (e.g. the fifty some people I
met in Boston in four days).
I don't know what to say about that. *I* am cool with small time-slices, and
relying on my friends to realize I need to be this way right now. Yet, I know
when I'm dropping people on the floor, and I may be too compulsive to stop.
I'm still searching for a new high, someone new everytime.
And I guess part of the addiction is that it IS possible for me, with my
lifestyle, to meet so many people in the flesh. I'm stressing right now, for
example, about whether to go visit Ian in YVR while I'm in SEA this weekend,
at the expense of working with Adam, seeing an old boss at MS, checking out
Arospace (925 E. Pike, recommended by SaL), a 5% chance of being invited to
Portland, bbq with MS contacts, a housewarming for Adam/FoRKcon, DAV dinner,
old college buddies, and last, and so least I will probably skip it for the
umpteenth time even though I care deeply about it, the Boeing 747 plant tour.
Dry not your crocodile tears, though. I realize these are problems I'd kill to
have had a few years ago.
Back behind the green curtain,
Rohit