I hate MySpace, and so do you, I bet, even though if you're under 30 you probably at least have an account, if not an active MySpace life. If you're 20, you check it at least 40 times a day, if the public computers in the Georgetown Leavey Center are any indication. Sometimes, if you're 20, you post comments on the profile of your friend who's at the computer right next to you, making it very annoying for people who actually have something important to do on the internet, like check Apple's share price. Come on, people. MySpace is for dorm rooms.

I think this quote from a friend of mine pretty much sums up my feelings on the whole MySpace thing. To set the context, I'd just sent him a link to a cool human space invaders short on YouTube, which has since apparently been taken down by its cranky copyright owner.

I love the internet. YouTube is so much more fun than livespacebookfacejournal. It's just like "here's some shit, dig." No bullshit "friends" and crap, just music and art. I know the only redeeming value of MySpace is to get your music out there, but who cares when it hardly ever works right anyway? And, sure, I get the fact that the intraweb's beyond fucking huge now and that the need for multiple, more focused directories is inherent but still... At least MySpace keeps a lot of [morons] in one spot instead of shittin up the rest of my internet.

If you also hate bullshit "friends" and crap, you would probably also love these:

• isolatr
• snubster
• introvertster

But that brings up an interesting question . . . . What do you call a community made up of people who hate the notion of community? An anticommunity? An acommunity? A loose collection of nonaffiliated individuals? Not catchy enough. It’s the old “wouldn’t-be-a-member-of-a-club-that-would-take-me-as-a-member” problem. Or the set of all well-defined sets (sets that do not contain themselves). Is it well-defined? If so, then it’s a member of the set of well-defined sets, and it contains itself. But then by definition it’s not well-defined. How can the set of well-defined sets not be well-defined? That's like saying a moral authority figure could be immoral. Logically impossible. Just ask Ralph Reed.

I have some advice for you. I know that unasked-for advice can be among the most unwelcome impositions, but for your sake I am hoping to preempt any thoughtless, or at last not fully thought out, decisions you might make about your future, given your propensity to leap before looking, your slightly overoptimistic sense of being able to accomplish anything you put your mind to, and that ever-prideful claim you like to make about being able to endure any hardship for at least a short period of time.

If you were thinking about taking a graduate-level summer school class in linear algebra while working full time, I might suggest that you think twice. Who knows: it may turn out that the class requires two hours of class time every evening, so that the only time you'd have to do your two to three hours of nightly homework would be after class, wedged in around shoveling some instant dinner into your mouth and walking the dog, who's been home alone for ten hours since you went to work in the morning. It may end up that you have to leave some studying undone every night so you can go to bed in time to get to work early because the class schedule you've chosen requires you to leave work before 4:00 pm every day. Now, if you've taken on this schedule, and your boss offers you a new job and a promotion, but warns you that there will be a period of time during which you'll actually be doing two jobs—the old one and the new one, while taking some additional time to train your replacement—perhaps, if this double-job time span should exactly overlap with your five-week summer school class, you should take a moment to think things through.

It's only five weeks, you may have thought, and knowing you, you'll be thinking you can endure anything for five weeks. You've told me a hundred times about that god-awful job you used to have, what, back in 1997? The one where you worked 60 hours a week without overtime, yada yada yada, hauling bags of asbestos and demolition debris all over Chicago in unsafe vehicles while your boss screamed at you on the two-way radio until the veins bulged out of his neck? I know that job, plus getting your best grades ever the year you lost both your parents, made you think that the jackboots of the world were naught but water off your back, in the case of this mixed metaphor "you" playing the role of a duck with regard to the behavior of the water.

And all those years in the gifted math program in junior high and high school, not to mention those three math essay awards they gave you in college, may have led you to believe that you were somehow preternaturally-abled in the mathematical arts. Recall, though, that the mathematics program at your "liberal arts" college rarely actually required that you demonstrate any real computational facility; its focus being more conceptual meant that you never really had to "calculate" anything before you punched holes in the proofs of, say, Lobachevsky, or the Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen paper. You just had to follow and understand their notation. In Lobachevsky or EPR this wasn't so bad, but Gauss and Riemann did really throw you for a loop. Riemann threw a lot of people through a loop, though, given that he tended to write like this:

I have in the first place, therefore, set myself the task of constructing the notion of a multiply extended magnitude out of general notions of magnitude. It will follow from this that a multiply extended magnitude is capable of different measure-relations, and consequently that space is only a particular case of a triply extended magnitude. But hence flows as a necessary consequence that the propositions of geometry cannot be derived from general notions of magnitude, but that the properties which distinguish space from other conceivable triply extended magnitudes are only to be deduced from experience. Thus arises the problem, to discover the simplest matters of fact from which the measure-relations of space may be determined; a problem which from the nature of the case is not completely determinate, since there may be several systems of matters of fact which suffice to determine the measure-relations of space—the most important system for our present purpose being that which Euclid has laid down as a foundation. These matters of fact are—like all matters of fact—not necessary, but only of empirical certainty; they are hypotheses. We may therefore investigate their probability, which within the limits of observation is of course very great, and inquire about the justice of their extension beyond the limits of observation, on the side both of the infinitely great and of the infinitely small.

But that's beside the point. This math class for which you've signed up may, in fact, require things of you that you've not really thought about or done since you were an engineering major, briefly, back in—what was it, 1991?—before you dropped out of college (the first time). In and of itself, that might be "doable," in the parlance of our times. But compounded with the situation at work that I mentioned previously, I suggest that perhaps you think twice before undertaking such nonsense. If it's not too late. It's not too late, is it?

It cooled off nicely this evening, for a change, and we walked down to Potomac Video to rent a movie. Ended up with Syriana and The Syrian Bride by coincidence. It’s been hot for months. Maybe in your part of the world it’s been the same way. I’ve been thinking about snow here and there lately; even though the mutual animosity between winter and me has a long history, in the hottest of afternoons when I’m sweating through my shirt from the exertion of just walking down the street, the thought of diving face first into a huge snowdrift sounds not half bad. The summer days are long, and those hours of daylight that remain even after work and after dinner are the most precious of all daylight hours, save perhaps the early morning and those when the sky is crystal blue, and I’m in no hurry to see them drain away. But honestly, part of me is looking forward to my once yearly trip to the dry cleaners, when I can have my shirts cleaned, starched, and pressed, knowing that I can get at least five or six wearings out of them if I’m diligent about wearing an undershirt and careful not to splash my balsamic vinegar down the front. I love balsamic vinegar. Mixed with mayonnaise as a condiment for fresh basil, tomatoes, and real mozzarella cheese in a flour tortilla wrap. It’s the best five-minute meal you can have, especially when your garden is producing more basil and tomatoes that you can eat.

Anyways, the new song is called Snow Sketch. Enjoy. It’s not really finished, but it’s as finished as it’s ever going to be. Like all of my songs, I guess.

Here it is, only 9:30 p.m. and I’ve finished everything on my to-do list for the evening. It feels like it’s been months since I’ve had this luxury, and perhaps it has. Planning a wedding, as I’m sure any veteran of the affair will say, is a bitch. To plan one long distance is doubly so. We spent most evenings for the first part of the year with a list of vendors to call and decisions to make. It was to be a simple affair—and largely it was, though it came in about 60% over our original and naively optimistic budget—but it was nonetheless sisyphusean in scope.

But there it is. Done. And everything happened exactly as we planned. More or less. Except for the DJ, who deviated from our painstakingly selected playlist. I use deviated in the most generous sense, because really, he barely touched our playlist. In fact, had we made a list of songs that definitely, definitely, under no circumstances would we want played at our wedding—well, those are the ones he put on the turntable. If you made a top 10 list of the worst, most clichéd songs to play at wedding receptions, you’ve probably got the second half of our reception covered. Bust a Move, for God’s sake. One More Night by Phil effing Collins. MC effing Hammer. My God. I feel like I should send out postcards to all the guests emphasizing that I did NOT tell the DJ to play Phil Collins, just to save whatever face I can.

But Jesus Bas, the flamenco guitar player, was exquisite. He strummed all Spanish sweetness during the ceremony and then hammered it home slightly electrified during the cocktail hour. He somehow worked it out with pedals to sing his own backing harmonies. It wasn’t the too-familiar-these-days guy with the sampling delay petal playing along with himself as a metronome. This guy was actually doing harmonies, and I (who used to co-own a recording studio, remember) have no idea how he pulled it off.

So here we are now, back from the honeymoon. We’re tanned, well-rested, and well-fed. In fact, I came back with an interesting and wholly inexplicable case of stripes, which at first I attributed to a possible tropical fungal infestation or insect by-product. My friend Chris postulated that they were caused by subdermal Carribean microleeches. It turns out (should I admit this?) that they were in fact due to a slight mishap with some lime juice and the sun, though I worry that those unfamiliar with my nocturnal habits might think they’re claw marks from my battles with were-beasts.

With all this time to kill nowadays (at least until my linear algebra class start on Monday), expect more updates than you know what to do with.