A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

So yeah, I’m feeling pretty low lately.  What I don’t understand very well is how strong the inverse correlation between my mood and the amount of support I have from good warm-hearted people.

Of course “correlation does not imply causality” and I rather hope that’s strongly the case here.  But I’ve received a rather humbling outpouring of well wishes and general interest an…

…

ok, stop.  Promised I wasn’t going to do this.

I started this post about two hours ago and I’m FAR from the mental/emotional state I was in when I started it, and I think I know why.

I’ve been building my primary box into a linux machine (I just swapped out my 350g for a 500g so if I get fed up I can just swap the SATA cable back in to go back to vista) and it’s had the desired effect. Between that and setting up my mactop with a vga->dvi cable, old keyboard and new craptastic mouse, I now have a poor man’s KVM so I can use the mactop as an alternate desktop.  It’s enough of a mindless makework task that I can do it while sleeping.

Between that and a couple posts here and around and an afternoon of my Pandora blues station, I’m in pretty good shape here.

It’s so odd how I get myself mired in muck and turn around all of a sudden to realize I’m in good spirits but hadn’t realized it.

Recursion, noun:  See recursion.

Look, I love it. I’ve met more awesome people (and let’s face it, they’ve met ME :p) via that goofy little chat thingie than I could possibly have expected, much less hoped.

But it’s no place for a reasonable conversation. Hey, I’m twitchy enough as it is.

What’s mildly entertaining is how long it’s taken me to realize that. It’s obvious enough at first blush, but the whole instant gratification of it is sneakily seductive.

It reminds me in that bizarre tangental way things remind me of things, of having been a member of Social Circles in the early 2ks. After the first few months, I started seeing the patterns of events and the fact that they’d had two a day was far less interesting. The turnover of members was interesting also. I remember hanging out with a core crew (well, two of them really) and I’d go to their happy hour events and wonder where the couple few new cool people from the previous month had gone.

Finally I realized what was happening. People were joining SC, doing a bunch of stuff, meeting people and they were clustering up and leaving. After all it was a multi-thousand dollar a year expense (ah, the good old days) so people were just going to the well, filling their bucket, and leaving.

And I’m starting to see a similar but different phenomenon with twitter. yeah, I’m in the stream most of most days because that’s what life is like now (it’s cheap and mildly social) but over the past week I’ve been trying to have reasonable protracted conversations with a couple/few people and using 140 character increments with polling lag was just brutal.

The evolution of my participation in the forum is really quite something over the last month.

Ah well, onward and upward I suppose.