blawg

I haven't had this steady of an internet connection in years. There weren't any clouds of wifi that would drift into my Japanese apartment, so I would sneak into the second floor of the local McDonalds. I had once seen a white person tapping at their computer with the blank concentration that only seems to come from dipping into that expanding universe of clicks and colors, the internet.

A combination of cheapness and ideological opposition to constant web access kept me from buying it at home, but I occasionally found myself sprinting down to the McDonald's because of an appointment to talk to someone across the world on Skype or just a desperate need to check my email. (I wrote about my experiences cadging free internet connections in Japan a while back in a previous post.) This gave me more time at home to just read, write or watch movies. You know, all the stuff we did before the web. I kept this blog up as a stream of infrequent and perilously long essays with literary pretensions. I didn't really get "real" blogs, aggregations of links to other places.

Since coming back to the New York I find I can't turn the corner without bumping into another damn wifi connection. Instead of settling down with a novel or essays before bed I'll be rechecking Slate and Salon.com. Now that I've started to addictively add links to the message in my gmail chat space I figure I might as well just put that big writing on China project on hold and post them here too. So this is an "I'm back" post, kinda. K, so... here's the cool stuff: