I’ve been feeling so damned connected this year. Perhaps it’s because I was living so alone that the net’s become my hometown, with me as some kind of case study for the networked society. I’ve had more time to browse and read what’s happening in this tiny little world (my intake of real news has plummeted, replaced with websites and mailing lists). All those interconnections between endlessly self-referring webloggers, putting faces to names at SXSW, jumping on and off disparate mailing lists, sending and receiving more and more personal mail, sharing photos across contintents, ICQing, forwarding, replying, responding, updating, clicking, publishing. It’s been wonderful, really knowing feeling substance to the cliché of having the world at one’s fingertips.

But still, a simple phone call out of the blue can have so much more effect.