they call it “the island”, as if there were no others
Cozy domestic scene with Leonard; laptop face-off, while I explain just *why* x86 virtualization is so fun and cool and such a great hedge for fin insts overexposed to ABCP based on tranches of subprime. And how AMD V and Intel VT effectively restored Popek Goldberg compliance.
“Am I getting too geeky for you?”
“Not at all!”
After a week in which I bled words into my latest major report, I kissed the girls and Jeremy goodbye with not inconsiderable regret and flew to Boston A-FRICKIN-GAIN. This is the sixth time I’ve come to the East Coast in a year and much as I love the East Coast, that is, my friends, way too much traveling. My soul is worn thin. And as Jeremy says I can’t even expense this one because it was volitional, not vocational: writing workshop on Martha’s Vineyard. Oh sure, it *sounds* cushy and idyllic and the people will probably be extremely smart and fun, but… I have no “but” here.
It’s good to be blogging again. Yatima just passed its fifth birthday and I somewhat massively overidentified with Danny’s big Oblomovka reassessment because this blog, too, has come up with some provisional answers to the questions it was originally set up to explore. My big questions aren’t anything like as zeitgeisty and geo-implicational as Danny’s, partly because he’s way smarter than me and partly because I am reluctant to think about anything much beyond myself, my endlessly fascinating self. (These factors may be related.)
End 2001-beginning 2002 were like a massive, slow-motion car crash for me – for quite a lot of people, am I right? Who here thought that sucked? – so I woke up in the summer of 2002 thinking “Who am I? What the fuck just happened?” And the Kill Bill-y plot twist was that I was pregnant into the bargain. Hence Yatima, and:
- the more-or-less daily discipline of counting my blessings that has helped enormously with the sanity thing, and
- my ongoing hip-deep immersion in the history of Western imperialism in the Middle East.
Things are supposed to go around in seven year increments, aren’t they? But ’04 was a leap year so September 11 fell on a Tuesday again this year, and I spent about a month and a half having serious conversations with some of my most problematic ghosts. I’m still listening to American Edit a lot when I run, so my theme song for the last fortnight has been “Wake me up when September ends.”
I did toy with the idea of giving up Yatima but how could I stop writing about my scintillating self? How would you, my half dozen insanely loyal Dear Readers, ever forgive me? So here’s a new question that I won’t be able to knock over in anything like five years. Various things are catastrophically broken! What are we going to do about it?
