Hi again, all, and greetings from the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago, where we are in the middle of a cold snap that is threatening to consume us all; in fact, today we're celebrating a week in a row now where the temperature in my neighborhood hasn't gotten above 20 degrees (-7 C) even for one minute, at any point in the day or night. Well, goddamn! It's so bad in Chicago these days, in fact, that we're threatening to break a record for the amount of days in a row it's been this cold, set way back in 1976 and not seriously challenged since.

And this just plays complete hell on one's social life, needless to say, because it's just so cold that you end up not wanting to leave your place at all, much less travel any considerable distance no matter what the reason. I mean, I've been back for a week now myself, and I haven't even made it yet down to the coffeehouse I usually hang out at, Intelligentsia in Lakeview; I've been writing entries for the last week instead at Dollop Coffeehouse in my neighborhood, where things are a little more expensive than Intelligentsia, a little worser in quality, the staff a little crappier to you, for no other reason than that it's three blocks from my place and Intelligentsia is 10 or 12. (At least Dollop has a plethora of hot nerdy women who hang out here, about the only thing they have in common with Intelligentsia - not that it does me any good of course, but it's always fun to at least have a nice view while out, if nothing else.)

And as strange as it is to admit, I actually find my tolerance for Chicago's cold weather diminishing with each winter I go through here, each year that I grow a little closer to death, and thinking more and more each time that this part of the year rolls around about simply moving permanently to a warmer climate, because I'm not sure how many more of these winters I'm going to be able to take. And the "strange" part of all that, of course, is that for most of my life, all the way up to a few years ago in fact, I've been the opposite type of person - I used to love cold weather, in fact, looked forward to it every year, and always considered the four-season year one of the really nice things about living in the midwest. And this was something that ran so strongly through my veins, something I felt so consistent about for so long in my life, that I had just assumed it had something to do with my genetics; that I was literally born to love the cold weather, to be specific. So how funny, then, that something I thought was genetically imprinted on me could start changing so profoundly, for no other reason than because of hitting a certain age.

I was thinking about this subject last week in St. Louis as well, in fact, about how my parents always ask me at night what time I want to get up the next morning, just like they did when I was younger - but how now the question is usually pointless, because I'm almost always awake before them in the morning anymore. And this may sound strange from a guy who doesn't need to be up in the morning for any particular reason, but my sleep schedule for the last half a decade or so has been remarkably conservative - asleep by midnight almost every day of the week, awake by 7 or 8 the next morning. And this all started, of course, because I did used to hold a series of day jobs when I was younger, which forced me to keep this schedule; and then I just kept maintaining this schedule after my last day job, in the hopes that I was going to be able to find a job again quickly (oh, ha ha ha, he now bitterly laughs when thinking of the memory), and didn't want to get my sleep schedule all screwed up during the lagtime. But the funny thing is that in that three-year period of voluntary early-birdism, I've grown to really love the things such a schedule affords my life - a nice, clear mind and body for writing in the early morning, no more four-hour stretches in the middle of the night, flipping from one informercial to the next and thinking about how fucking boring it is to be alone and awake in the middle of the night.

And the irony of this, of course, is the same as before - that from small childhood all the way up to a couple of years ago, I was firmly a night owl who preferred being such, and in fact had such an impossible time rousing myself in the mornings that I came to believe all this to be a genetic trait, that my DNA was literally cosmpelling me to be a night owl. And this used to be such a strong facet of my personality, in fact, that my parents are still asking me during holidays what time I want to be woken up in the morning, when for years now it's usually been me making the coffee for my family in the morning and not the other way around.

Incidents like these have taught me a very important new lesson in life, one that I literally didn't know even just a couple of years ago - that we as humans really are in complete control over our destinies, our actions, our decisions, even the things that we often wrongly categorize as inherited or genetic traits, that we believe we have no control over changing. And it's because of this, for example, that I tend to have very little sympathy for addicts, or agree with the 12-Step belief that addicts are born addicts and will die addicts, and that there is nothing an addict can do about it except simply avoid their addictive substance as much as possible. (And by the way - hell yeah I had to deal with some pretty irate 12-Steppers a couple of weeks ago, when detailing these opinions of mine for the first time. But as always, I digress.)

The good thing about learning this lesson, though, is that it provides me a sense of comfort and optimism when it comes to this arts center in Chicago I'm trying to open these days, and especially concerning the trickiest part of this arts center - of the aspects that require a certain personality trait to succeed, traits that I sometimes do not have much of an abundance of. Because, let's face it, 90 percent of opening a small business requires almost no independent intelligence at all - you simply read a book about how to accomplish that particular thing, take notes on what the author is telilng you to do, then go actually do the things found in your notes. And this, for example, is literally as difficult as it gets when it comes to such subjects as writing a business plan, preparing financial statements, registering your company and the like. It's math, not art - it's simply a matter of sucking in a bunch of rules, memorizing those rules, then spitting the rules back out to others, just like what all of us did for thirteen years during our childhood educations.

It's this fact, I imagine, that inspires so many Americans to try opening a small business (over a million new ones in the US just last year, if you can believe it), but is simultaneously the thing that leads to 75 percent of these businesses failing in the first three years. Because sure, 90 percent of it is math and rote memorization, but that other 10 percent is just natural, ephemeral elements, based mostly on inherent personality and hard to define in any specific way - whether you get along with others easily, whether you're a naturally paranoid person or a naturally trusting one, whether you can manage other people in exactly the right way, so that they're efficient workers yet happy humans.

And this, frankly, is where the greatest problem lays with my arts center, because I'm the first to admit that I currently lack some of these ephemeral skills necessary to pull a small business off - I don't get along with others very well in a corporate environment, and I tend to get pissed off rather quickly when things don't go my way, plus of course I have this pesky habit when meeting idiots of simply calling them idiots, and demanding that they convince me why I should bother listening to what they have to say in the first place. And it's these subjects that have started to worry me more and more in the last couple of years, as the arts center has progressed from a random thought while in Munich into a pipe dream, then to a workable decision, and now into an actual project - that this arrogance of mine, this complete intolerance I have for both stupidity and office politics, would eventually stop this arts center from ever being a success. And that since these are a genetic part of my being, personality traits that I have been exhibiting since I was a small child, there would be no chance of me ever overcoming them, but that I'd simply have to find a complicated way to work around them once the center is finally open.

This recent lesson I've learned has helped with all that; it's made me realize that no, in fact, just about any aspect of our personality can change over the course of our lives, no matter how long we previously exhibited that trait or how deeply we thought it was engraved into the very fiber of our beings. Hell, some of these traits in my own life have been changing without me even being aware of it at first; and if such a thing like that can happen, you bet your sweet ass that I can change other aspects of my personality by choice, once I've determined that I want to make the change in the first place. And this is a nice belief to have, I think, even if it is only a theory and may in fact not actually work in some cases - that at the very least, if I want it bad enough and work hard enough at it, I really can change certain core parts of my personality that currently hamper me from getting what I want. That the day will come when I no longer find myself saying to strangers, "You're a fucking moron, and this conversation we just had is twenty minutes of my life I will never get back." (And let's make no mistake - I've actually said such a thing out loud to dozens and dozens of strangers, over the last 20 or so years of my life.) It's a comforting thought, that with the right amount of work we can actually change things about ourselves that we didn't think we could; and it's an empowering thought as well, even if it's not true in some cases, because at least it gets you working positively in a constructive direction, instead of sitting around the rest of your life with a fucking victim mentality guiding all your actions, that "boo hoo, woe is me, my DNA is all screwed up and there's nothing I can do about it" crap that I had already lost all tolerance for even by the time I was a teenager.

And so, okay, I'll issue the challenge to you as well, what the hell: Is there a part of your own personality you wish was different, but until now never thought you could do anything about? Will you like me take on this challenge in 2006, and see if we can't all become tiny bit better of human beings by a year from now? Instead of endlessly asking yourself "Why do I keep dating losers" or "Why can't I quit smoking" or "Why do I always lose my fucking shit while in line at Starbucks and end up screaming at everyone," will you actually take up the challenge itself, and see if you can't actually overcome it? Thoughts on the subject are welcome, at ilikejason at hotmail dot com; as always, I'll reprint the more interesting ones when appropriate, with your name not mentioned unless you specifically request otherwise.

Yes, I know, I still owe some journal entries I've been promising to write! Specifically I've gotten a couple of emails now about not only part 3 of my "addiction and how it relates to my own life" series that I started over Thanksgiving, but also my big write-up on futurist Ray Kurzweil, this crazy fucker who some of you may be familiar with already, who is always predicting these events in the tech world that sound absolutely ludicrous at first...until, of course, it's ten years later and they're actually coming true.

Anyway, yes, the entries are coming, but I thought I'd spit out yet another random prediction of Kurzweil's just to hold you all over: that by 2010 we will see the popular rise of an entirely new type of computing system, the 'Very Personal Computer' (or vPC), where the CPU and other chips are actually sewn into one's clothes, and interacted with through eyeglasses, earphones and virtual-reality 'glove keyboards' (which actually exist, if you didn't realize this already, although right now are too buggy to be a legitimately viable commercial product). And to tell you the truth, in 2005 we're already seeing the first attempts at vPCs, although admittedly in a rather rough form right now; witness, for example, the growing amount of ski jackets you can now buy, with iPod cords actually sewn into the lining, so that you plug in your iPod in a padded pocket at the bottom of the coat, and a remote control and earphones are embedded in the coat's collar. I mean, Kurzweil's talking about a lot more than this, of course - he's talking about taking the guts of an actual laptop and sewing it inside something you wear, instead of just a conduit for a self-contained device that already exists. But hey, if such conduits already do exist, and are getting more and more popular by the day, suddenly Kurzweil's 2010 vPC prediction doesn't sound so crazy after all. And that of course is both the brilliance and madness of Kurzweil, as existing fans already know, that his shit is super crazy but just exactly realistic enough that you say, "Hmm, okay, maybe something like that will happen. Maybe all those dot-commers in the Bay area will be wearing their computers in their clothes by 2010. Maybe we will build a computer that's as smart as a human brain by 2030, and maybe this computer will gain self-sentiency as a result. Maybe we will have the means to artifically grow human organs by 2050, making organ donor cards and transplant waiting lists as quaint and obsolete as hearing about someone contracting polio. Hmm, maybe!"

Anyway, like I said, more on this soon - as well as the very complicated story of my last romantic relationship, and why I still ultimately consider it a very healthy thing for me to have gone through, despite many others disagreeing; as well as my long-promised series of "memory maps" (that is, Google satellite images of various places from my youth, annotated by me and with a series of childhood stories corresponding with each annotation), with three of them now compiled and ready to be written (the subdivision where I grew up, my college campus, and the campus of Six Flags Over St. Louis, where I spent a huge portion of my summers every year as a youth). And is that it on the journal's back burner for now? Yeah, I think it is, finally.

Okay, see you tomorrow!