Yesterday Neil Gershenfeld from MIT came to speak at our company. Before the talk started I said to my co-worker, "This is going to go right over my head." She said sternly: "Don't be silly! You don't even know what he's going to say!" About thirty seconds into his talk my brain tapped me on the shoulder, said, "Gonna take a snack break," and didn't bother to come back. NB was engaging and covered a lot of ground fast, snapping through complex, scary diagrams that he treated like slideshow wallpaper. Mostly he seemed to be talking about "personal fabrication," which--in the evolution of machine production--is rather like looking at the first crude prototype of a Star Trek food and clothing synthesizer, converting computer requests into the manufacture of items, which sounds pretty mundane until you learn that an MIT student has actually e-mailed a bicycle to his sister in Australia. Pretty wild.

So, I am tired. Like, chronically physically tired, among other things, and it's starting to drag at my concentration. There's an art-school truism that says "don't erase." Don't stop to erase bad and inaccurate lines in your drawing, just keep drawing, let your hand work, keep it moving. Flowing. Which is what I've been doing with the s/x stuff. The last few times though, I've been erasing and redoing too much, working the paper. It's starting to rip. Last night was especially bad, and I'm not entirely happy with what I wrote. It wasn't fun. Originally I was just playing around, getting my kicks and ya-yas out, but now the characters are taking their lives seriously, and I'm feeling itchy and duty-bound, like I have to write every day, and I'm worried that I'm going to step back at some point and realize that the picture is out of whack, like badly copied fan-art where the nose is askew and the eyes too far apart and it's all vaguely creepy.

A lot of people have friended me and I feel slightly anxious, like maybe people think I do this all the time, non-stop.

So I'm probably going to stop writing this for a bit. Stop thinking about it anyway, working myself up each day to the plan of writing. I might write more, but if it's going to happen, I want it to just happen. And maybe I'll write something else.

Okay, now I feel like Derek Zoolander making a moue of his lips and announcing his retirement in earnest, self-important tones--cheesyyyyyy. Can someone please step up to play Hansel so I can nap? Cool.

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