early in my search i came upon the official site for the movie (which, incidentally, i have not actually seen yet, since i was always determined to read the book first (i've missed a few "important" movies that way. screw it, i'll get to them). at the rate i am reading it i will rent the movie on tuesday night, i think.). in an interview with david cronenberg, i found the following quote, which i think is really interesting:

"Q: Will the internet will allow us to transform and transcend the body?

DC: It think the internet is a hugely important event, because of its interactivity. Print -- language - is high technology. I believe it was Macluhan who mentioned a moment in Saint Augustine's writing where he said he was struck by horror when he saw someone reading without moving his lips. It meant the end of the oral tradition, the internalization of print. And people forget that the most invisible technology is most potent When we read we become disembodied. The internet does the same thing -- you sit there, but not really in your body, directly interacting with another writer, which you can't quite do when reading a book. It's an enhancement, an enlargement of what has already existed but not all at once in the same way."

i have been thinking about this for the last hour or so.

i can't get my thoughts straight so much yet, but i wonder if this is why sometimes i feel like i am disappearing. so much of my life, my lifeline to those who i love and are an integral part of my life, that is, was online chat with people from home when i was in iowa. the contact i had with people at work, with customers, was as a disembodied voice on the phone. i walked down the streets by myself, slipping by people unnoticed or ignored.

more than ever before my existence was largely cerebral. and, rather than this being due to my comfort with analyzing and categorizing everything i can, it was because i existed as a name and written word or voice on a telephone line rather than as a physical, real person, extant.

but how much colder and alone i would have been if i didn't at least have that contact with home.

i wonder, though, what that's done to me, internally.

i am beginning to feel an emptiness inside me, which is becoming a hatred of the last 7 months, everything that brought me there, and everything that happened before i left.

it's almost 5am. i am not tired. i will sleep for so long today. i have another phone interview at 330pm.