Listening: Immortal Beloved sdtrk
I'd rather be: at the beach
Desiring: all my toys in one place
Aches and Complaints: frickin tetnus shot

Living in LA, it's really hard not to be a commuter (though I don't know *where* someone could easily be employed and not commute to work, telecommuting not being held to any geographic location and all), and I've been commuting steadily for over six years. My senior year of college I (technically) lived at home, 35 miles away from USC but often as not I spent the night in a friend's apartment. When I didn't it was quite likely that I would come home around two in the morning and leave by six am.

I got used to carrying everything in my car; Deitrich, I would joke, was the world's largest backpack.

Even when I moved into my own place in LA I kept a lot of things in my car because I still spent many nights at friends' places, having built a healthy habit for vagrancy. Often as not things would be left at the friend's apartment for use the next time I was over. The longer I built a relationship with someone the more of my stuff wound up at their place, especially technological-type wares. Videos and DVDs because I don't own a TV, software and files because I went for a long time without a computer and longer still without the Internet. My climbing shoes live in the Squire's gym bag because I only go rock climbing with him. I could take them home with me, but there is just no point.

In some ways it became more convenient to attach new toys in my life to someone else's apparatus - Molasses' computer is more robust and if something goes wrong he knows how to fix it as opposed to my solution which is to whine and then beg one of my computer-type friends to come look at the machine. So it makes sense to save bunches of files on his computer. I primarily use mine to check my email when I'm at home and bored. And so when he gave me a camera the associated software went on his computer. I'm not even sure if my computer has a USB port. Of course that means I can only play with my pictures when I'm at his place and for whatever reason not actually interacting with him.

I'm not really sure about what to do with a situation like this. I live some 30 miles away from him but a lot of my life is stowed away at his apartment. I'm there approximately every other night and most weekends and several friends have assumed we live together. Hypothetically I could back up my stuff at my apartment and keep my camera with me as much as possible. But already I have to plan mundane things two days in advance such as my clothes and food.


Eh. don't mind me I'm just whining... Living together is out of the question due to our old fashioned parents and the fact that it would have to uproot both he and his roommate from their current digs. I'm typically at his place more than mine so I don't want to force a separation when we often end up sharing more than space. But with gas being so expensive and wishing I had the time to do something with documents and images I have stored on his computer, I wish I had a better plan than keeping things on hold until I get back to his place and we're both not doing anything.

Also I feel my desire to fight the presence of a cell phone in my life losing out to increasing irritation whenever I'm forced away from telecommunication. On Wednesday the power went out to my work building when everything was down. More than an hour after the lights came back on the network was restored and until then I couldn't make any phone calls. My friends tease me for being a black hole of communication over the weekend and even my sister has gotten on my case.

Cell phones are such a rediculously new thing and we got along just fine without them. To the best of my figuring folks normally don't have the kind of emergency that they can be good for. But they still answer and make calls like they are, regardless of where they are - on the road or in the bathroom. I like being unreachable. When I had a pager a lot of people would beep me for the stupidest shit. They would just want to ask a question that they could have emailed me or they felt it was their god-given right to call me at 530PM to ask me what I was doing that night.

Even when I had a message that said something in the lines of "Hi. You've reached me. Leave a message or your number and I'll get back to you when I'm ready to." people would just page me over and over until I called them back. At the time I was storyteller and all too often it was to answer rules questions. I appreciated it when my friends called me up to see what I was up to. When I was in school and then commuting all over hither and yon I was impossible to reach and it was nearly impossible to guess when I would check my email.

But when I subtracted the annoying calls from ones that were wanted I ended up with a very small number that seemed far too small to justify owning the pager. After a while it just had too many mishaps and was too much of a pain to keep fixing so I got rid of it.

I just hate it when other people have cell phones and tell me to call whenever and then it turns out that their phones are off most of the time. I don't want to do that. So I just want to be able to call out when I feel I need to. *sigh* We'll see, I guess.