I stay up later than I should. I wear myself out. I have a piano lesson tomorrow and I haven't touched the keys in weeks. This is the dire point I have reached in my life -- exhaustion and lack of preparation.

Wes Montgomery has been forgiving this evening. It's a wonder I don't just take a shovel to my LPs -- I listen to one side so much that I can feel the needle digging deeper into the groove each time.

I am still wandering in and out of houses, arriving at Carolyn's after ten for leftover icecream pie. I park next door in the dead people's driveway so her parents won't come in at five in the morning to ask me to move my car when it's cold outside and I haven't bothered to tie my shoes. I hate parking at the dead people's house -- I hate the walk along the gutter in the dark while cars pass a little too close. We slip out for coffee in the morning when I owe my three dollars to two other people -- three if you count Carolyn herself -- for Coldplay, for David Sedaris, for movies.

Sometimes it is a test to see if sleeping in a different bed will feel different aside from mattresses -- if staring up at a ceiling with a diffent texture will change the texture of a day -- if waking up and smelling like someone else will connect or repel.

This flurry of location and change means I am in and out of the car, hovering just above the speed limit and gassing it on curves.

I can afford to roll down the windows, but I can't afford the dark of a movie theatre.

I skip breakfasts on bad days and don't bother on others -- too great a hassle to hear the egg crack. Icecream it is.

Whether or not it's obvious, I've been spending a lot more time here -- maybe not here as in HERE at rocket-fish (why have a personal webpage if you're not going to neglect it a little?) but here as in HERE, this big old place called the internet. It is consuming my time (now more than ever) especially since I got plugged into flickr and things like del.icio.us and GoogleMaps and 43things, bowing down to the blogging gods like Dooce, Heather Champ, Kottke, and the lovely geeks over at BoingBoing.

Filing through all this stuff -- all this media, personal or objective -- has made me a lot more aware of the internet as a community, aware of technology as a means to real communication, a real way to connect people. I mean, WOW -- there are so many awesome things out there. What an expansive place! I think about things like remixing audiotours of the MoMA via iPods and podcasts. What a weird and wacky thing to do -- to make your own audiotour, so you've got all these techno geeks walking through a museum with their iPods in their pockets. Art and technology begets art, I guess? Finally a way to use our geeky technotoys as a means to social activity!

I guess that's what's made me so excited about the internet again -- I've discovered a little corner of it that can be used as an alternate social world. I say alternate because sometimes when I get excited about that corner (now, for instance), it carries over into the physical world and I try to explain to a friend over coffee why this new thing that I've discovered is so cool, what it means for us, how this new thing will change our lives forever and save all of mankind from sudden and certain social and creative demise.

Frequently I find that this friend that I'm talking to over coffee doesn't know what to do with my excitement over this thing that doesn't exist in the "real world" -- usually it is so removed and abstract that it means absolutely nothing to them. Things like flickr and del.icio.us and even RSS feeds and podcasts. Things that sometimes I'm not even directly involved in -- I don't have an RSS reader (yet) or even an RSS feed for this page (something that, I'm sure, is a big pain in the ass for some of you), nor do I own an iPod or subscribe to podcasts. This, of course, is due to my $6.50-an-hour-three-nights-a-week-hostess-at-a-pizza-place status in the world (a hostess who, subsequently, owes someone $50 for a Coldplay concert ticket, someone else $20 for some DVDs, and someone else $25 for a signed copy of David Sedaris's most recent book).

I guess I'm getting ahead of myself.

Podcasts are a really new thing. They've been around for a little while, but they're new to me, and I don't think they're that widely known by your average iPod owner -- I have friends with iPods who've never even heard of podcasts. You can read a little background here. I've been keeping my eye on the podcast world, though not too closely; I'm afraid if I dabble too much in it, I'll have a $300 hole in my pocket before too long. But basically, my take on the podcast world is this: an audio approach to blogging. It's true -- there are plenty of different types of podcasts, some of which involve "podsafe music," things more like radio shows -- but there are other podcasts which are musings or thoughts or apostrophes. (This is cheesy, but...) I think about the tapes Keri Russell's character makes on Felicity -- a sort of audio version of a personal letter. With podcasts, anyone can create their own radio show, talk or music, and anyone can listen whether it's through RSS on an iPod (like a subscription) or through downloading an mp3 file off a blog (like buying the new issue of a magazine every month at the bookstore). And there are, of course, communities surrounding podcasts, namely iPodder.org.

Anyway, I was surfing around on flickr the other day, browsing through groups and clicking through pictures -- pretty standard daily/hourly activity for me, lately -- and I found this great picture of a strawberry. I adore fruit, and naturally am responsive to photographs of fruit, so I favorited the photo (sort of like creating a bookmark), and visited the photographer's profile. That's something I always do -- visit people's profiles -- because you can sometimes find little facts about the person's life -- usually where they're located, maybe how old they are, their name, and a link to their website.

So I click on this guy's website and see that he's got a podcast, and given my recent interest in them I'm like, "Okay, cool, a podcast" and I listen to his most recent show. I was impressed by the conversational nature and by the podcast in general -- he confessed to reading books on physics (Hawking, etc.) for conversation, fodder, what have you -- something I do on occasion with books like E=mc2: a Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation or Hawking's Universe in a Nusthell, not because I understand all of them, but because I like to think and to remind myself of how little I know, sometimes. He's also got this relaxed, genuine voice -- not like some of the more radio-announcer podcaster voices out there. Given that I liked what I heard and planned on coming back, I left a comment on the show with an explanation of how I'd found him, etc. Sometimes I think you people underestimate the thrill of receiving a comment -- evidence that a real person is reading or listening or connecting or maybe even despising something you've created, especially when it isn't your mom or your classmate or your wife or something.

Anyway, I log in to flickr today to see what recent comments have been made on my photos and I see that I've got some flickr mail -- an email from Mike:

From: Mydailycommute
Subject:You gave me an idea!

Hi glynnish,
You gave me an idea after you found (and listened to) my podcast via flickr. Thought you would be interested in listening to it if you didn't subscribe. mydailycommute.blogspot.com -- check podcast #24

Anyway, thanks for getting me thinking!

Mike D.

Listen to podcast #24 here, or check out the My Daily Commute blog. Mike mentions me and rocket-fish and flickr and del.icio.us and podcasting. It's rare, in my experience, that you find people so connected and excited about this stuff as more than just a new thing to do online. So often I find that people leave comments on photos or blogs as a kind of passive communication -- comments given in the hope that comments will be received -- not comments for the sake of some kind of active communcation or connection. There have, of course, been exceptions, like Mike or Jyoseph or Phil.

Anyway, listen to the podcast and check out Mike's page, and hopefully you'll pick up on some of the excitement that comes with these newfangled internet communities and tools -- something I hope I'll be able to talk about more here. Mike's also made me painfully aware of how half-assed some of the stuff is here -- the bio page that I trimmed down to basically nothing, the poetry and portfolio links that don't work, etc. etc. etc. It's high time that I make rocket-fish a little more stranger-friendly, a little less dependent on knowledge of my physical existence, and I think it's time to go pick up a book on RSS. We'll see how far I can get.

So thanks, Mike (if you're reading), for the podcast and for mirroring my excitement about all these new webtoys. The internet, as a place, is feeling a lot more like one giant community -- a little more fun, a little more cozy -- and I hope that through all these new tools I can help people discover that. And maybe, like this experience with Mike, I can get a lot more reflected excitement in place of those blank stares over coffee. We can only hope.