Well, hi ho there, ladies and germs, and as always I apologize for going so long without updating this journal. (For those who don't know, by the way, I continue to update lots of other online stuff regularly, even though I haven't been doing so well on this personal journal; for example, I try to update my Second Life journal at least once a day, my moblog once every couple of days, my del.icio.us bookmarks the same amount, my Flickr account once a week, etc. Yeah, I know it's not exactly the same thing.) Did you know, by the way, that my home broadband account was down there for awhile? It was -- two weeks altogether, because of some technical problems, which needless to say was frustrating as hell, in that I'm not only living most of my life online these days but also making what little revenue I generate these days online as well.

Anyway, so my connection is finally back on again, and after a week I'm finally almost back to the place I was before it clicked off to begin with, so I thought I'd finally get a journal entry written for here and get everyone caught up on what's been going on with me. As always, it's not a lot, which is why I don't update this journal very much to begin with...

--So to begin with, it was my birthday last week -- I turned 38, which of course is now officially close enough to 40 to see the unholy light it gives off. (I kid, of course -- as regular readers know, in fact, the years leading up to my 40th have so far not been nearly as stressful as the ones leading to my 30th, a fact I'm grateful for.) It was a low-key celebration this year, to tell you the truth; about the only thing I did to mark it was go out to Sunday brunch the day before with my friend Kate (at Holiday Uptown in my neighborhood), which is always fun because it's the only excuse I have for getting drunk off bloody marys at one in the afternoon.

I also spent some time this birthday in quiet contemplation, as I do every birthday, thinking over the last 12 months of my life and how I've decided to consider them. And hmm, where do you even start with this most previous year of mine? That's the question I found myself asking on my birthday, and never quite coming to a satisfactory answer. The last 12 months, after all, saw me accept my first-ever senior-management corporate position, just to quit it two months later after discovering that my boss was lying to everyone about how much money was available. It was the year that saw me get involved with the tech industry for the first time, after spending years mercilessly making fun of people in the tech industry, just to have the whole process chew me up and spit me back out the other side. It was the year I finally opened my arts center, after two years of preparation, just to have to shut it down again three months later -- yet another victim of this lying, incompetent ex-boss of mine, himself the cause of so many of my problems last year. And most ironic, of course, this last year saw one of the biggest public acknowledgements by the media of my work ever, including mentions by Boing Boing, CNN, Reuters, USAToday and more -- but it was all because of the writing I've been doing about Second Life, something I not only consider the nerdiest fuckin' thing I've ever gotten involved with, but that seemingly confirms my critics' beliefs that I am a complete goddamn loser who is actively bringing about the downfall of intelligent society as we speak.

So, you know, how should one exactly react to all this? On the one hand, I regret almost all the tech-industry things I got involved with last year, just because it all ended up doing so much lasting damage to my overall life; but then again, I learned a tremendous amount of stuff about myself because of the experience, positive stuff I had never truly known for a fact before (for example, that I can be put in charge of 20 people and a million dollars, and actually do a pretty decent job with it). I spent about six months of last year looking like a genius in public, and six months looking like a complete fucking idiot -- so does that cancel itself out in the end, and add up to a zero?

I still don't know, to tell you the truth, and still can't quite figure out how to think about the last 12 months of my life. I'll tell you this, though -- I got really burned last year by relying on outside funding for my projects, which makes me really not in the mood to repeat the experience this year, even if that means delaying a lot of the stuff I want to do until I can fund them myself. Now that I think about it, in fact, that's probably the most important lesson I've learned from all this -- that no matter how good a situation seems, no matter how stable or assured, you never know when a person you're relying on might turn out to be a lying, thieving, sociopathic little shitbag. And by making the success of my arts center financially reliant on the empty promises a person like this was making in my life, I took something I had been slowly working on for two years and deliberately made it fall apart. That's the strongest emotion I take away from the last year of my life -- overwhelming frustration and anger over what happened to my arts center, and a determined resolution to never let such a situation ever arise in my life again even once.

This last year confirmed something that I didn't particularly want confirmed -- that if I want to pull off my projects in the way I'm really envisioning, if I want to absolutely guarantee their success, I simply have no other choice but to go out and fund them myself, most likely by doing something ridiculous and corporate during the day that pays obscene, almost illegal amounts of cash. And that's kind of a lousy realization to make, because money is the one thing I don't have these days, which means that my projects are bound to get deferred even longer than before. But man, I'll tell you, I'd rather put off entire projects for another entire year or more at this point, than to have a repeat of The Great Fucking Startup Disaster of 2006.

--So what else has been going on with me? Well, how's this for proof that the world's coming to an end? As of today, I've been cigarette-free for 10 days. Zounds! Glee! Yeah, I know, hard to believe, and is actually the longest I've gone without smoking since I first started 19 years ago. The difference, it seems, between this time and the other eight unsuccessful attempts at quitting I've made in the past, are the nicotine patches I'm using this time; far from being the glorified sugar pills I thought they'd be, they actually do seem to take the edge off the absolutely worst "I'll kill you all in your sleep" nicotine cravings. (For those who are curious, the strongest type of patch [the one I'm on, of course] emits 21 milligrams of nicotine over 24 hours, or roughly 1 mg an hour. A Marlboro Red, on the other hand, typically gives you 20 mgs of nicotine by itself; so if you smoke two cigarettes in an hour, as I often would, that's 40 mgs of nicotine versus the 1 mg of the patch.) Of course, it helps that I'm unemployed right now as well; even 20 minutes in a public location these days, like a cafe or bookstore, is enough for me to want to run around and start smacking complete strangers in the face as hard as I possibly can, FOR BEING TOO GODDAMNED STUPID TO NOT DESERVE A FUCKING SLAP IN THE FACE, YOU USELESS COCKSUCKING MEATSACK. You're on notice, people!

--And so I'm combining this with other big news these days -- I've just started the process of having 30 of my teeth replaced with fake ones this spring, which I already know from experience is going to involve at least 60 dentist visits, enough Novocaine to kill a horse, and more Vicodin than a meth addict can shake his spasmic finger at. This is in fact a Christmas present my parents got me a number of years ago -- and indeed, in 2003 I bit the bullet and had the first six teeth done, but was such a long and painful process that I've been putting off all the rest. Anyway, it's time, it's time, especially since I've now quit smoking as well, and want to start eating a lot more too. So I've got that to look forward to this spring.

--And why am I planning on eating a lot more this spring? Well, because with this cigarette cessation and dental work, I want to also start getting on my bicycle a lot more this year than I ever have in the past; in fact, my goal by Labor Day is to have biked at least once a day all summer, and for my maximum ride distance to be somewhere around 30 miles before getting fatally pooped, versus the pathetic 3 miles it was when I was a smoker. And to pull that off, I'm going to need not only much better lungs but a lot more fuel going into my system, so that my body can turn it into a lot more energy. And let's face it, I'm already dangerously underweight as it is -- around 140 pounds right now, versus my ideal 175 -- which means I still have 35 pounds to gain before I'm at zero. Ugh!

So anyway, the plan is for all this to work in tandem -- the extra food will make me want to bike more, which will give my lungs a bigger anaerobic workout, which will help motivate me to continue being a non-smoker, which will increase both my appetite and my sense of smell, making me want to eat more, etc etc. And the secret hope, of course, is that all this cyclical goodness will bleed into other facets of my life as well -- that the new physique, smile and energy will inspire me to get out a lot more, that that will bring on new business opportunities, or perhaps even a new romantic relationship (although frankly I'm still not in too much of a mood for one). Like I said, last year confirmed something for me that I didn't necessarily want to have confirmed -- that if I really do want to pull off the kind of grandiose projects I'm dreaming of these days, unfortunately I can't rely on a single other person for a single other bit of help, but instead need to literally raise every penny I need myself and perform every action required. And who knows? Maybe that really does start with something seemingly trivial like quitting smoking; maybe the willpower, self-reliance and discipline needed to pull that off will start a whole chain of resulting effects, that in some way eventually lead to me having a good $10,000 chunk of money saved by a year from now, and finally ready to open this fucking arts center without a single goddamn asshole being in a position to stop me. Oops, I'm sorry. Did I mention that I just quit smoking?

--And unfortunately, that is just about all I have to report on from here in Chicago -- the weather here has continued to be shitty, I've continued to be broke, my circle of friends has continued to be non-existent, as has my love life, and so I tend to not have any kind of fun news to report whatsoever. Although, I suppose there's this -- that I'm just about to start a new business within Second Life, a new prefabricated building business to be precise, called "Fabb" and with the motto "Houses for robots and other sentient beings." Yes, I am a fucking loser! Yes, I get that! You don't need to keep reminding me! Anyway, for fellow losers (i.e. fans of architecture, especially Mid-Century Modernism, fans of SL building, and fans of digital entrepreneurism), you can go over to my Second Life blog to read all the details behind Fabb, as well as the latest with the houses being developed.

Okay, that's it. See you later, fucking pussies. Oops, I'm sorry. Did I mention that I just quit smoking?