January 2nd, 2008

I think the above must have been part of someone’s New Year’s Eve outfit. Now they suggest that, given the right weather pattern or incantation, the telephone pole will take flight.

One of the fine baristas at one of my favorite coffeeshops told me: “I have trouble with contemporary fiction. I need some floppy hats or pirates or something.”

It was a fine reminder that people are looking for all kinds of things in books. The people who are looking for anything in books, that is.

…I keep wondering about what to do online.

I have only so much attention, and online, there are so many places to pay it. My Gmail chat status message was always “continuous partial attention;” then I gave up on Gchat entirely. I check Facebook a few times a week, but I don’t facebook, per se; I’m not a zombie, I’ve thrown no snowballs, sent no Hotness points, declared none of my many creative friends to be Most Creative. On MySpace, I log on infrequently enough to have gotten my password phished. I remain stubbornly loyal to LiveJournal for no good reason. Fundamentally, I think the issue is that I don’t want to be always-on. I comment, but I rarely instant message. I’m asynchronous, not synchronous. Now you see me, now you don’t. That’s my comfort zone. But I worry that it’s not enough, that not IMing much or Twittering at all means that I’m out of it in some essential way. And there’ll be new places to be — I’m sure some of you are already there, wherever ‘there’ is — and I’ll have to decide if I want to be there too. How do you all decide where to have online presences?