I ran into a friend & local blogger today at the grocery store where I used to work. Immediately following our hellos & hugs she says, “you haven’t blogged.“. wowzers. Though perhaps a bit of a long one here, Mrs. R — this one’s for you.

Her comment shook to the surface some ruminative thoughts I have been having recently, thoughts related to this blog yes, but also ones of a much broader scope. What she said would have probably stayed there, in the past tense, had I not also received a myspace message from a friend in portland, another whom I haven’t spoken to in quite some time, wishing me a happy birthday. First, these are nice (tongue-in-cheek-in-heart, if y’know what I mean) reminders of things I wish I were able to find time to relax in: blogging about my day to day, spying on friends via myspace; engaging in an online community that not only do I find rewarding, but a community that I believe has & will continue to, in ways we cannot imagine, completely reshape who we are & how we are. This online community (& hopefully you know I’m not just referencing myspace here) is tantamount to evolution, & survival is contingent upon evolution. If given the proper alcoholic stimuli & enough time, & I could bore you to the point of regression with my praise of technology, the interweb & the future in general. & then here I am trying to remember the last time I bookmarked something in Ma.gnolia. bother.

It is often a frustrating & quite ironic circumstance that I work so much on the interweb, that I haven’t the time to engage the interweb. With both of my jobs I’m currently spending the majority of my time building web applications. I’m honing my programming skills, rereading techie books. Those sites which at one time I simply used, used & enjoyed, I’m now examining, figuring out how exactly they might have programmed this or that element & how I could incorporate that into what I’m working on. I’m critically pricking & prodding the User Interface instead of allowing the User Interface to guide & enthrall me. & try as I might, I cannot pull myself out of this mindset.

& it is this somewhat beleaguered balance of paycheck to prowess that keeps me in this quasi-state of flux where while I feel that I must always be working, always applying, proving & promoting myself, I also feel that I have steadily begun racing down the path toward certainty. I work with a web firm in town, Blink New Media. Weekly we meet, typically from the comfort of our living rooms or porches, via Skype. At the end of each meeting, I find myself somewhat contemplative & mesmerized. I catch myself saying, “wow, this is what I do.” It still hasn’t sunk in yet. I am getting paid to do something that not only am I good at, I also exceptionally enjoy it as well. I’m not at a comfortable enough point in my life yet to quit the doubt in the back of my head, that fear that another dead-end job with meager pay is just waiting around the next corner for me.

I started Cleopatra’s Nose two & a half years ago, when I slept in the utility room of a ran-down one bedroom house on Monroe Street. I was just a few weeks off from being unemployed & paying bills on credit. I played in a band & borrowed wireless from my neighbors’ unsecured connection. I had just recently planted the start from an avocado pit. I was in a fresh, exciting relationship & was blessed with a deeply sincere, symbiotic relationship with my roommate & good friend, bgg (I’d love to link something to his name, but alas, he is interwebedly incognito). Things are much different now. Though I still don’t have a bed, I live on my own now, in a great little apartment downtown. I am the furthest from unemployed that I possibly could be (I know this isn’t true. Not even a year ago I was more employed than I am now, holding fort at three different places.) & my avocado plant is doing quite well.

Robin, I thank you for the gibe. It seems that oftentimes it requires enticing for me to sit down & catalog something here on Cleo’s Nose, but afterwards it always feels nice.

kasb — I will most certainly be your penpal, especially if by penpal you mean the person who crashes on your & Harv’s couch in Nashville during my upcoming late-summer-2007-drour-of-the-southern-states. (Of course you know, but a “drour” is the classic “drinking-tour”)