Greetings, fellow stargazers! And hello from the sleepy St. Louis suburb of St. Charles, where I am once again spending a week celebrating the Christmas holiday with my family, just like I did a month ago for Thanksgiving. Which is...eh, well, it's nice to see my family again, of course, just like it always is, although my Christmas trip every year always seem to wear me down in a way my Thanksgiving trip doesn't. See, for those who don't know, I don't actually drive or even own a driver's license, which of course is just fine when I'm in Chicago and can get around by public transportation and bike; but in St. Charles, unfortunately, one needs a car to even take a piss, much less to get to any destination worth visiting in the first place. And so whenever I'm in town myself, I tend to be a bit of a prisoner at my parents' place, because they live on the edge of a rural area and are just miles and miles away from any place worth visiting here. And like I said, this isn't so bad at Thanksgiving, because that trip every year tends to be my first one back to St. Charles in quite awhile, and a week of cable television and online porn tends to be just enough to get me through it all; but then to come back for yet another week, just three weeks after that Thanksgiving visit, tends to steamroll that feeling of not having independent movement here, and in that case a week of cable television and online porn tends to not mollify me at all.

Fortunately for me, though, my parents tend to be sympathetic to this plight of mine, so are always happy to drive me around to places in St. Charles where I can simply hang out and be around people my age...although, I admit, it always feels weird and juvenile to be 36 years old and have to rely on one's parents to drive them around to their destination. So for example, today I'm writing this entry from a place called Crooked Tree Coffeehouse, on First Capitol Drive across the street from Lindenwood University, which is just as pleasant and unique a place as, say, Dollop or Intelligentsia up in Chicago, two of my regular haunts. And boy, let me just ask this, as long as we're on the subject - why did it take so fucking long for St. Charles County to start getting hangout places, like coffeehouses and cool-ass arts centers and the like? I can't even begin to describe how desperately my friends and I wished for such places to exist back in the '80s, when we were all in high school ourselves and living in St. Charles full-time; but back then, of course, there were no coffeehouses, no cool-ass arts centers, in fact not a single thing whatsoever in the entire county for people under 21 to do on a boring Tuesday night. And so we'd instead do what bored nerdy teenagers have been doing to amuse themselves in suburban areas since the beginning of time - hang out at graveyards, hang out at crappy local diners, hang out on the Second Street Bridge down at the St. Charles riverfront (which actually got demolished a number of years ago because of safety concerns - oh, my poor, much-missed Second Street Bridge!), talking and playing music for each other, thinking about how much we fucking hated St. Charles and how we couldn't wait to get the fuck out of here as quickly as we possibly could.

So anyway, as long as I have all this extra time on my hands this week, I thought I'd see if I couldn't finally get a bunch of online stuff done that I never seem able to get done up in Chicago, since I don't have regular internet access up there and I do here. So one of the things I've already done, for example, is to finally get my new account at Friendster up and running smoothly - to fill out all the rest of my profile details, get some more photos uploaded, start the long process of finding out which of my friends are already on the service themselves. And wow, I've discovered something really interesting about the process that I'm sure all you Friendster regulars already realize - that Friendster is instantly addictive, in this powerful heroin-like way, once you actually start getting your friends added and the full power of the "extended network" suddenly kicks in.

Take this as a good example - that one of the first people there to add me as a friend was my old Chicago poetry buddy Shappy, who now lives in New York and works at Bob Holman's fabled Bowery Poetry Club, across the street from CBGB's. And that unto itself was cool enough, of course, because it's always difficult to get Shappy to actually sit down and write an email about what's been going on with him, so Friendster will actually make it easier for me to keep up with the latest concerning him. But then Shappy is actually one of those social magnets as well (and always has been, in fact, as long as I've known him) - one of those people who's just an expert at gathering people around him, and maintaining a social circle that makes it easy for those in that circle to get ahold of each other as well. So, once he linked me at Friendster, and once I got a chance to look at his own Friends list, I ended up just finding a whole crapload of old poetry friends from my slam days there, people who in some cases I haven't talked to in years and years - Eitean Kadosh, for example, a writer in Los Angeles who I know from my experiences at the Albuquerque Poetry Festival; and Krystal Ashe (who used to host my favorite poetry show here in Chicago, until moving to California herself a couple of years ago); and Lucy Anderton (another old Chicago open-mic friend), and it just goes on and on.

So then that's another fun and addictive part of the Friendster experience, of continually stumbling across people you already know, and then going and checking out their Friends lists and stumbling across yet more people you already know, and getting caught up with them and seeing what they've been up to recently. And Friendster makes it so easy to do this, too, much easier than most of the other social-networking systems I belong to, which obviously is why Friendster has become so popular; between the one-click message abilities, the front page with all your friends and their updates listed, the ability to see who's been checking out your profile and the like, it ends up being a real pleasure to spend a little time there and just randomly clicking from one thing to the next.

But then you get to what might be the most addictive thing of all about Friendster - that the service actually keeps track of all these friends-of-friends-of-friends lists, and can instantly tell you if a new person you've stumbled across is already connected to you in this tenuous, ephemeral way. So for example, let's say you're single, like me, and get interested in who else on Friendster is single as well, and lives in the same city as you, and has specifically said in their profile that they're looking to date. So you can do what I precisely did earlier this morning, and run a system search like you would do at a dating/personals website, and get your usual hits of hotties and weirdos and all the other people who pop up under such a search. But unlike a regular dating website, Friendster actually tells you if this person is already connected to you in this ephemeral way; and in my case, for example, I found something like a good dozen single women in the system who actually are. So then instead of a regular personals site, the whole thing becomes more like getting introduced to someone at a party by a mutual friend; because you have that mutual friend, of course, and an instant excuse to drop the person a random line and say, "Hey, we have a mutual friend! Let's go out!"

Anyway, I'm sure I'll have lots more to say about all this, once I can actually sit down and gather my thoughts in a more coherent way; I just thought for now that I'd at least mention it, and mention what fun I've been having playing with the service for the last 24 hours. (And sorry, by the way, that my entry today is so scatter-brained; I've already had way too much coffee, to tell you the truth, which always tends to make me ramble and digress much more than I usually do, which is already a lot.)

Okay, so what else am I hoping to get done before the 29th finally rolls around? Well...

--One of the other things that occurred to me this week, now that I have access to my dad's laptop, is that I could actually try out chat software for the first time if I wanted, and especially Google's new chat service, which I have yet to actually try for the first time. So, I've decided to install a chat client to this laptop later today, and see if I can't get that up and running. Now, I'll warn you that it might not be up and running yet, at the particular moment you might be reading this; if you want to try it out, though, in the off-chance that I have gotten it set up (or if you want to add me to your Contact list beforehand), here will be my various account names: Google and MSN: ilikejason; Yahoo: jasonpettuschicago; no AIM or ICQ accounts. Anyway, we'll see how that goes, I guess, or if I'll just be bombarded with "spam chats" and have to shut the whole thing down right after I get it set up in the first place.

--And Lordy, Lordy, it looks like I might just finally start getting some of my journal archives up this week as well - to be specific, hopefully all my old entries from 1999, when I first started this journal, and maybe a big chunk of 2000 entries as well. And I know, I'm always seeming to apologize for this taking so fucking long; but it's a long, complicated process, I'm tellin' ya, or at least if you want to do it the way I want to do it, where once they're finally entered I will never have to goddamn deal with them again. See, all my old entries are saved exactly as they were handcoded to begin with - with all the old HTML tags, that is, all the paragraph marks and italic marks and all the other crap. So that's the first thing I have to do whenever I want to get an old entry ready for archiving - to simply take that 2,000-word entry and strip it of all its HTML formatting, and get it in the plain-text form that Movable Type likes. And then of course I have to add all the metadata for that entry as well, again in this special format that Movable Type wants you to use for importing old archives - the title, the date it was originally posted, the time it was originally posted and the like.

And then of course I also have to add all the semantic crap which is the whole reason for switching to Movable Type to begin with - the keywords associated with each entry, the categories and sub-categories each entry belongs to, again in this special way that Movable Type asks you to do when importing old entries. So between all that, plus editing the entry once again for spelling and grammar, and checking each and every hyperlink to see if it's outdated, it's taking me, what, 15 minutes to get each and every old entry of mine ready to be imported into my new type-engine database. And I have, what, a thousand old entries that need to be imported into my new database? 1,200? Something like that. Plus of course I have the several thousand other pages from my old site to get ready and imported as well, all the poetry and all the essays, all the photographs, all the audio files, all the PDF files, Jesus fucking Christ it just goes on and on and on. So anyway, that's why it's taking me so long to get any of my old material up to the new version of my site, because it is just such an unwieldy, administrative-heavy process that is no fun in any definition of the word, and I keep putting it off and putting it off because it is just such a goddamn chore to actually sit and do. But anyway, like I said, I'm going to try to bite the bullet this week and see if I can't at least get 1999's old entries finally up here and accessible again, and maybe even some of 2000's entries as well, if I'm feeling particularly inspired.

--Oh, and let's see, what else? Well, I've decided to finally close down one of my Blogger pages, the [metafeed] one, and to change the name of my other Blogger page from [random audio] to [random media], to reflect the fact that I'll be sending photos there as well in the future; but I've already gotten into the reasons for this in a previous entry, if you'd like to go check that out. And I've got a whole page of things to check out in my "Getting Things Done" notebook (my "@internet" action list, to be precise); and a whole bunch of new RSS subscriptions to add to my Bloglines account, and old ones to remove; and a whole bunch of interesting things I've been emailing to myself over the last month, that it's now finally time for me to go check out. Oh, and I thought I'd try to get more of my Hotmail-to-Gmail migration finished over the holidays as well - in fact, the only thing I use my Hotmail account for anymore is simply receiving new emails from strangers, because I'm terrified of actually promoting my pristine spam-free Gmail account online. So that'd be nice - to finally get all my old archived email off my Hotmail account and into my Gmail one, and to get my entire address book finally moved over, etc. Oh, and I've decided to shut down all my old employment-website accounts as well, and start up brand-new ones at all the various services I belong to (the Monsters, the CareerBuilders, etc), simply because I wrote a new resume this fall and feel like making a clean break with it at all these online employment places.

And is that it? Well, I'm probably forgetting a few things as well, to tell you the truth; but hey, if I can get even half of all this shit actually accomplished over the next week, I'll count myself as pretty lucky. And of course there are the physical-world things I'm hoping to accomplish here in Missouri this week as well - to finally get a chance to hang out with TGS (or "The Good Samaritan," that reader of mine who donated an entire G4 desktop system to me back in October), and to hopefully spend a little time with my old college friends Tim and Beth, and of course to hopefully get to spend a bunch of time with my brother and sister-in-law, who unbelievably enough will actually be in town this year for Christmas, which is the first time in something like three or four years that all of us will be in town for the holidays at the same time. And that'll be really nice, I think, because my brother and sister-in-law and I all get along together really, really well, and I miss having the chance to spend more time with them than what I usually get.

And whew, I think that's finally it! Or, well, I'll also simply be doing the stuff that I always do in Chicago as well - updating the Jason Pettus Instant Locator™ and this main journal, that is, so feel free to follow along each day this week, if you yourself are bored shitless too. Oh, and I've been saving up some really interesting things to talk about this week at the main journal as well, including: some thoughts about a letter I received this week from Microsoft's Heather Hamilton, concerning whether or not the Onion is or is not accepting money from corporations to write nasty satirical articles about them (aka "the sneakiest goddamn viral marketing campaign ever invented"); and some thoughts regarding Google's AdSense program, and what it might mean that they're now starting to run ads with images in them (as part of their recent deal with AOL); and maybe even some new thoughts about Generation X, to tell you the truth, and whether or not my generation is in fact largely to blame for the fascist, politically-incorrect mess America finds itself in these days. (That is, if I can actually get my thoughts concerning this subject whipped up into a coherent form, which at present they are not.)

Okay, so that's finally it; and I can barely even think straight anymore, frankly, because I've got so much coffee coursing through my veins right now, so I guess it's for the best that I sign off for today. Bye!