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Did you hear?! Everyone is on that BBS Web Ring Classmates Friendster LinkdIn Myspace Facebook! Finally you can find all those great social connections that life tossed aside like so much poorly preserved cole slaw. You can find that guy in shop class who seemed to have a lock the next Hulkamania winner, or that one guy you never really liked but who had an SNES. It -- like that overly sharp but really useful potato peeler -- has a dark side. All this interconnected and faux intimacy comes at price, and a hefty price at that. The internet, for all it's touted New Economy doublespeak and lauds of it's Transformative Power on Society, is, to a multi-billion dollar industry, just a simplier way to collect marketing information. Now, through some magical programming hackery, corporations can send targeted advertising email, and be reasonably sure that you will in fact enjoy the latest invention from StarFrit, or the latest breakthrough in late '70's Chevy Nova wheelwe...

Packing, not in the urban LA sense, where I might have a 'gat' or be walking around 'strapped', but real-life, non-ebonics laden packing: kinda sucks. Packing makes one aware of just how much needless crap one totes around from one place to the other. Crap that's been stuffed into a cubby hole and largely forgotten until it's unearthed for packing, and which brings one of two thoughts to mind: 1) Holy crap!? Where has this been! I've really been missing my insulin! 2) I have no idea what this is, but since I haven't thrown this away since 1993 when I was really into Pearl Jam, it must be really important. What never runs through your mind is the really important option : 3) If I haven't been missing this: half empty bottle of Wild Turkey / bobblehead of Tony Danza/novelty key chain for a Porsche which I used in a sad attempt to lure girls while dancing pathetically to Flock of Seagulls / syringe / back issues of The Spoon Advocate (activists pushing ...

So we've dropped the hammer, as it were. Committed to a smallish wooden box deemed habitable by the government, all the various building organizations that be, and some guy named Ted. The box we bought is attached to a few other boxes, and is deemed higher up in the real estate hierarchy than the ubiquitous condo. It's the house on training wheels, the too large to be put in a skyscraper dwelling, it's the townhouse. Lifting subjects is probably the toughest part of buying a place. There is no more hemming and hawing, weighing, considering, and contemplating. No more sitting on the fence. No matter how pretty and comfortable a fence it may be, you can't live there. And when you lift subjects, there comes a definite amount of (misplaced and delusional) certainty. All the nagging doubts you've had are pushed to the back. Like that piece of chicken you just had for lunch which had been left on the counter maybe a little bit too long, now's not the time to reconsid...

Real estate is a genuinely tortuous experiment in testing man's flexibility to change. I'm puzzled by which Great Thinker thought up the idea, I can only imagine it was some disgraced member of the Inquisition who was deemed "too hardcore" and "too effective at his job". Maybe they polled the opinion of every curmudgeon on every street in North America and drew up the plans. You know the curmudgeon, usually with a name that starts with "Old Man..", like "Old Man Petersen". And he has one too many cats/lizards/dogs/miniature hyenas. Never throws anything out, and any frisbee that goes over his fence is lost for sure. And then when he dies, one finds out that he was really a kind hearted soul who painted impressionist artwork for the local dog shelter. Well, if it was a Disney show. In reality, the old man always has an entirely illegal cache of weapons and a taste in media that could politely be described as Miscellaneous And Confusing Por...