January 4, 1999.

I am the laziest creature imaginable.

I have taken advantage of the snowstorm as an excuse to snuggle up in my city grotto...I tried to go to my afternoon class - cross my heart - but I was easily discouraged by the streetcar stoppages. I rationalize it with the following: how many jobs will I be able to get where I can just skip with no explanation or reason? Enjoy it now, love.

As a result, I've been homebound and slothful all day today. Good thing the supermarket & video store are only 2 blocks away...I ran out of Diet Coke today, and it wouldn't'a been pretty.

I was thinking about media the other day, in the grand sweeping philosophical way I have, the way that's made my name a "sell" word on Wall Street...ahem. Someone on Ally McBeal made a comment on the "empty" personalities populating the modern world. And it made me think about that whole phenomenon.

I mean, it's not an illusion. People seem emptier these days because they feel emptier. And I think that's due to in large part to the media, to this information superage that we find our selves in. Every minute of every day, we are bombarded with tiny and not-so-tiny slices of life, in the widest diversity imaginable. The result is confusing and overwhelming and disorienting in the extreme...seeing so many lives make our own seem small and prosaic and inferior.

So we worry. We fret about our choices, and search to relax, to find peace. Trying to find a philosophy in the midst of overload. Seems to me that the sanest thing to do would be to take your kids as far away from culture as possible...but am I arrogant enough to deny my progeny thousands of years worth of technological advance, medical science and creature comforts? Living by your wits is hard...I think this is what terrifies so many about Y2K predictions. Maybe we won't be up to it.

But you know...your responsibility is not to live. It's to live well, to do good. I'm not prescribing Xian ideology here, although I'm proudly United Church. No matter how much of an anarchist you profess to be, everybody knows deep down what "doing good" means. Even if we don't know how to go about it.

Okay, was that a bit sanctimonious? I started off trying to fill space and ended up here. Back to your regularly scheduled rants.

Except that I really have nothing left to share today. I have some delicious secrets about a couple of close friends, but they're staying with me, right? If you're snowbound like me and looking for something to do in the next little while, you could do worse than rent The Game...it's by the guy who did Seven, and it's a total mind fuck from start to finish.

There.