(...or, an oblique answer to Kass' questions.)

i've had some very interesting online conversations, or fragments of conversations, with kids lately. (at least with those for whom homework isn't quite a headache yet ::snicker::) for instance, last night, seemingly out of the blue, Trev started asking me a thousand and one questions about tropical places, and the landscape and psycho-geography of our conversation swung from Thailand and the Far East to the Pacific Coast of Mexico, ending up finally in desolate Kahoolawe, a barren island eight miles southwest of Maui.

one of the last things i mentioned to Trev in that wide-ranging and engaging convo was the fact of my semi-nomadic existence. three years ago, i decided to leave my home in Berkeley and go back to Maui. as things turned out, it became a six-month sojourn there, and then a return to the Bay Area for the spring and summer. as anyone who knows me realizes, this situation has suited me quite well. i am indeed now nomadic, as i have no permanent home. a humpback whale moving here and there from one locus of the Pacific Ocean to another. while this lifestyle isn't for everyone, there are things to recommend about it, not least of which is the freedom to renounce materialism--i.e., a gabled house with white picket fences, a gas-guzzling SUV, encumbering toys and baggage of all sorts, etc.

this being the modern age, where foraging for food and water isn't quite the task it used to be, like it was for truly nomadic tribes like the Bedouin of North Africa, or certain Aborigine clans of Australia, the question of where my home really lies is a reasonable one. i used to have one and only one answer for this: and it was unequivocal, as the cliche has it--home is where the heart is. it's wherever i am at any given point in time, and it's who (not where) resides in my heart at any present. i would love to say that everyone whom i have ever known is fully present with me in my heart-home at any time. but that would be false. it's only human nature to have concentric circles of loved ones, with those nearest at any moment being the most present and vivid in mind.

more recently, i've come to see this alternate reality of "home" in a more manifestly obvious way. it is, of course, this weblogging community of ours. there are two aspects to this 'homespace' -- the visible one, as represented by the individuals in the lists on this page or on the weblogs list, and the invisible one... i.e. this weblog's readership: other non-TIC/AIC students, my far-flung family and relatives, my equally farflung friends and naturally, random visitors happening to stumble on this weblog since this is the Wild Wild West of cyberspace, and we're all still pioneers here.

it's not as curious as it may first seem to consider this weblogspace as 'home' of a sort. it's quite clear, for those who have now picked up the habit of weblogging, that this place is as familiar and comfortable to return to as one's bedroom or computer room, even one's bathroom (if certain scatological weblog entries are to be taken at face value). i'm tempted, of course, to link that word to someone's recent entry on one vulgarity or another, but i shall refrain, to protect the sensibilities of the sensitive ;-) anyway, it's obvious that this weblogging space that we started, way back in spring, has taken on a life of its own, and the concentric ripples are moving farther along the surface of this particular lake, overlapping other ripples from other stones tossed. for me, it has become indeed emblematic of a kind of home... where i have no literal home in the real world save that abstraction of "heart," this is a very real place in what we call this other abstraction of "cyberspace" where i can truly find living souls to come home to.

and right here is where i have to part company with my dear friends Tom and Aaron, who appear to deride the "list-ness" of other people's weblogs. i.e., the fact that other webloggers seem to delight in listing or otherwise commenting on the quotidian details of their lives.

(nota bene: this rant section will have to be continued after lunch, as i look up and realize it IS 1:30 p.m. and the rumbling that i hear is after all my stomach, and not Nikolai's snoring.)

weblogs as 'home' pages

START rant
sure, Tom, new ideas are generated by lists, or a recital of the 'dreadfully moribund' details of someone's day. losing Quad's or Spark's voices, for instance--as their logs are prime examples of listitudinousness--would be as discouraging to me as losing Aaron's was. that's because their logs are, in sum, a wonderful picture of their lives. each weblog update is a moment in their day, each day's entry is a snapshot in time, and stitched together it all yields the texture and mindscape of the larger picture of a life. and considering lists per se, have you forgotten already how interesting and provocative a simple list can be? leaf to the front of your Harper's magazine and check out the Index once more and convince me that no new ideas can be generated there.

it smacks of elitism to look upon others who are not nearly as verbose or given to sesquipedalianism in their writing as somehow the purveyor of inferior weblogs, or heaven forfend, inferior thinking. (and if the heavy-handed sarcasm and meta-commentary isn't obvious here, i'm pounding it in with a ball-peen hammer.) i happen to find, to cite just one instance, Jorge's weblog entries keenly interesting. for someone whose first language isn't English, his ability to take those telling moments of his day and convert them via his second language into the pixels of his weblog, i.e. the contours of his life, inspires me day in and day out.
END rant

update, 6:30 p.m.

Tom took the bait ;-) welcome back, man... i missed your voice. it was like... wait, why am i re-writing this? interested parties can check out my brief rebuttal to Tom's retort here. and the operative clue in my bait above starts with the linked text "who appear to deride."

and for those who might STILL miss the point, i point you here to good ol' dictionary.com's definition of "rant" ... have fun deciphering this particular verbal spat. or is it one? ::snicker::

and for the meta-lesson of the day... there's a point to all this: beware what you write, it might come back to bite you. be as clear as possible (and i DO count myself among the worst perpetrators of unclarity sometimes, so there i've caveated my caveats). for instance, Tom wrote this on his weblog:

Other than my parents knowing what I did today, what good is that? It's not. That doesn't mean I'm shutting down my weblog. I'm merely observing a dangerous, thought-killing trend.

a trend for whom? while it seems fairly clear that Tom's referring to himself and his weblog, this could very well be misunderstood to mean... a trend in this weblogging community, and not just Tom's own weblogging practice. of course, in the interests of utter transparency--and btw one of the coolest things about weblogging--one can easily amend or edit one's previously written text to say what one really means. hee-hee.

bottom line: i am not above eating my own words when i mis-speak or mis-write--nor should you, either--nor am i above a little blatant manipulation now and then to make busy college freshmen come back and say what's really up ;-)

ok ok Trev, here's my riffed-off Damien-list too...

THINGS I WANT TO DO BEFORE I DIE

• hangglide
• learn Hopi, Gujarati and French
• dive and retrieve fresh water from this offshore underwater spring in south Maui, like the ancient Hawaiians used to do. (this is material for another weblog, obviously.)
• walk on a reforested Kahoolawe Island. with Trev.
• find a rare, undiscovered species of island bird.
• see Rammstein, live. (ok, a blatant steal of ratboy's item, but hey.)

THINGS I WOULD LIKE NOT TO HAVE DONE BEFORE I DIE

• forget my own name (senility? ::chuckle::)
• realize that another Holocaust is happening
• eat some kiwi fruit unintentionally
• not wake up from a nightmare
• see any of you die before me

{ net.casting }
^