What is the purpose of writing? Moreover, what is the purpose of the writer when they are not writing? I've been asking myself these questions for six years now, and I've never been satisfied with my answers.

It's such a pleasure to have friends here. I do still sometimes wish that all of my friends lived in one place. It would mean that the times between talks such as these would not be so long and so quiet. Instead I find myself the occasional Gertrude Stein of the geek community, bringing them together and letting contacts go as they may.

To quote Stein, we geeks are ourselves something of a lost generation. We are geographically isolated from each other, yet depend on our electronic boxes for our socialization, our information, our friendships, our world. We are minorities in every community, and the majority in a few shockingly-priced communities that are out of the reach of those of us bright enough to master our trades but not to be the shockingly brilliant wunderkind that brings out the mega-funding from corporate America.

It's a bit odd to be sitting here right now. Big Spring Jam is quickly gearing up—Huntsville's annual music festival is less than half a block away from where I'm sitting right now. I've been listening to Michael McDonald do his soundcheck. There's a surreal quality to all this.

Sean has arrived. We spent a good while pestering each other today while I was ostensibly working.

Tonight it's me, the techno, and a bottle of wine.

I am at home, peacefully and quietly nursing a drink like the adult that I'm generally not, desperately wishing this techno were louder and that I were amongst friends at an all-night rave. That's my mood—every once in a while I get the urge to slap on the most anonymous clothes I can, tie on my combat boots, and drag someone out with me to dance mindlessly until the sun rises.

While driving back from buying my lunch today, I was thinking about the concept of age, and how much it matters to people. We have a twofold conception of age in this society—we are obsessed both with our chronological age and our mental age. Due to our obsession with numbers in base ten, we see numbers that end with a '0' as being somehow more significant than others, more indicative of a stage of life, than any number in between.

Normally, this isn't a problem. But things get interesting when mental age doesn't equal chronological age. We as society members expect everyone to mature somewhere along an expected scale. We have certain expectations about the emotional maturation of two-year-olds versus forty-year-olds, for example.