Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Mom calls from the car, I think, on her way back from temple. It's my grandfather' yarzeit this weekend -- the Jewish anniversary of his death, usually celebrated by direct descendants with candle and book, there in synagogue, rising into the prayer for the dead with a sprinkling of fellow mourners.

My synagogue lives inside me these days. So do book and candle, I suppose. I've chosen the blogging life in the sticks over standing alone with memory and thought in the crowd of a morning service.

I remember how soft his tan cheek was in the morning, how he smelled of aftershave and pipe tobacco, making eggs for us in his tiny kitchen, white undershirt and khaki pants. I remember his voice, laughing high and hearty; his focused eye in the workshop, the smell of solder, the glow of the television tube.

But I remember them less, each year. And those moments I do remember -- his pipe, his earlobes, his tan shoes -- grow more crystallized, become isoltated from the rest of him, as if a series of close-up snapshots could somehow comprise a being once vibrant and beloved in time and space.

Half a poem came today, before my mother called to remind me of the anniversary of his passage from illness into death. I wanted to bend it towards him after the fact, but our world is so far removed from the one he knew. I couldn't make it fit.

Our neighbors who we have never met
are burning leaves and stormdowned branches
In the yard behind the trees.

The air turns opaque with not-fog.
Smoke covers us. Ashes fall like snow
sparse and grey past the picture window.

Mp3blogger Kwaya Na Kisser has posted the best rainy Saturday mix of downloadable songs ever.

But if you need to cry, you really should be listening to The World Spins Madly On:

Thought of you
And where you’d gone
And the world spins madly on...

And remembering those once here to be loved, lest even their tiniest airborne fragments melt into the air and disappear.

Yearbook deadline. End of term grades. Schoolwide technology planning.

Too much expected, but not enough authority to make anything happen. No clear direction, few advocates.

Meanwhile my stomach roils like the ocean in a perfect storm. My brain is ever restless, flipping unspent coins long past their IOU.

I wake up on the couch at midnight, forehead burning too hot and nervous to sleep. Am starting to wonder if the stomachchurn is a sign that this job is too stressful, too undirected. It's hard to keep the voices out, even when I'm playing with the kids.

Sick. Tired. Impotent. Unfulfilled. Anxious.

Wide awake and dreaming of you.

I don't know the way, but I know this isn't the way. Bring on The Weepies, because sometimes the music gets it right:

Got an old ghost locked in my closet, I know I know
Got an old ghost locked in my closet, I know I know
I got, I got, I got to keep it there.

Came down on a bottle rocket
Found my heart right where I locked it
Last night like rain on chalk
It's gone like money in my pocket.

See those stars shining in your eyes and I know I know
See those stars shining in your eyes and I know I know
I got, I got, I got to keep it there.

(from Keep it There, by the Weepies.)

For a free taste of the Weepies, check out their MySpace page, because MySpace pages have streaming musical goodness. Or, if you're podded, swing by Jefito's recent Weepies write-up, which contains two absolutely gorgeous downloads off their new album >Say I Am You, including new personal anthem The World Spins Madly On:

I woke up and wished that I was dead
With an aching in my head
I lay motionless in bed
I thought of you
And where you’d gone
Let the world spin madly on

And everything that I’d said I’d do
Like make the world brand new
And take the time for you
Just got lost
And stepped right through the dawn
And the world spins madly on.

And I let the day go round
And I always say good bye
I watch the stars from my windowsill
The whole world is moving and I’m standing still

I woke up and wished that I was dead
With an aching in my head
I lay motionless in bed
The night is here
And the day is gone
And the world spins madly on
Thought of you
And where you’d gone
And the world spins madly on

The Weepies: The soundtrack of your life. Better mood management than Muzak, that's for sure.

The Onion: Arbiter of cool?

Thanks to a healthy addiction to HypeMachine and a longheld fascination with making the world my soundtrack regardless of genre, I own most of the albums mentioned in this week's AV Club. Arctic Monkeys? Flaming Lips? Morrisey? Yeah Yeah Yeahs? Hey, I'm so cool, I play outtakes of that **** for my middle school students. In class. (And Morrisey's first album was better.)

Especially disappointing, then, to have never heard of the seven bands the AV Club labels as up and coming in their accompanying grammatically garbled feature The New What's Next In Music: 2006.

Okay, maybe I don't get out much anymore -- with two kids and a dayjob, until the folk festival circuit kicks in, I'm not the SXSW type. The part of me that longs for Bonaroo is easy overwhelmed by the part of me that hates seeing music from more than 20 rows back - and when you've seen Phish from the sixth row, with your elbows up against Jon Fishman's mother, anything else is a letdown. I'd rather be at this year's Jazz and Heritage festival, anyway. Damn you, Dad.

But you want up and coming? I knew The Weepies when they were just Deb Talan. And I saw Brandi Carlile open for Ray LaMontagne way back before anyone even posted her music. So maybe there's hope.

Yeah, the AV Club's the bomb and all, but I got some cred, yo. In 1991 my turntable swam with De La Soul, Fugazi, the Lemonheads. I got mistaken for a teacher by Evan Dando and Juliana Hatfield once. Heck, I saw Green Day perform free at the Hatch Shell when we were all, like, fifteen. Beat that, beyotch. Those "up and coming" bands never go far, anyway.

PS: In case it wasn't glaringly obvious, I'm still ubersick, mostly brainfogged and hallucinating, with that burning forehead that accompanies the early stages of "get yo butt back in bed before you fall over". Here's hoping my natural "voice" will return with my health, cuz this pseudo-ironic streetchat isn't winning me any new fans, fo' shizzle.

Something about how I always feel guilty when I stay home sick, because how sick is too sick for work? I mean, I could go, I guess -- I just wouldn't make any sense.

Something about how, by staying home sick today, I'm missing a perfect bluemoon opportunity for a workplace grand slam: namely, a precious 15 minute faculty meeting slot to a) introduce/promote the nifty new Pinpoint Library resources search aggregator seen here, b) deliver the message about public librarian classroom visits, c) offer real relevance by placing it in the contextually powerful happy coincidence of National Library Week -- and, in doing so, d) redefine library services in the context of teaching.

Something about how I'm sick, with specific attention to stomach (crampy), back (fluswollen), head (dizzy & vague).

Something about how I hope this blog entry makes sense, because I'm never sure that I'm making any sense when I'm sick. Or did I say that already? Note to self: sick sucks.

Outside the window tufts and scraped earth, and undefined boundaries -- raw, with promise but so much work ahead to make it ours.

Inside, I am home sick. And, windowstaring, sick at the prospect of merely coaxing this physical space into something natural and safe for my children.

Last fall the task seemed obvious, immediate: clear the leaves off the newly filled leachfield before the snows came, in the hopes that a cleared yard would better weather the winter. Foresight would have kept me from merely pushing the leaves to the periphery.

Now it is too late.

The lawn grows tiny tufts of grass among wide swaths of dirt, goes half-raked at a time. The woods remain inaccessible, indefined, their boundaries piled high with last year's brush and soggy leaves.

The road and its surrounding spaces are all torn up from a plow operator that merely shrugged off our concern about the plans underneath. "You gotta put the snow somewhere," and I'm not the type to push harder against what I kow in my heart to be bad business. Now, along the long driveway, dirt mounds sulk among shattered shrubbery, adding insult to injury, laughing in the face of our desire for trim and organic environs.

Small garden spaces up against the house taunt me with their easy management, their clean boundaries, their rock borders and slate paths.

The task of making woods and lawn merge together seamlessly becomes herculean.

When I was a kid there were two yards, front and back. Also a hidden circle of drt behind the rhododendrons of our traffic circle driveway. All were secluded, separated from each other and the rest of the world -- by high crisscross fence, or the rock ledges that rose into the wilderness between our house and the one behind.

None were playspaces, really. Sure, we threw balls against those tilted screen in t-ball season on the flat front, threw frisbees into the hurricane there one year. But we were indoor children, bookish and clumsy. Outside was for going places, not being. The playground structure's swings were for contemplation, not play. It is telling that when I was too restless in the house, my mother would threaten to make me run around the block, rather than just expend my energy in outdoor play.

We planted bulbs one year, I remember -- the first, when we had just moved from a more suburban, less wild and more public lawn two towns over. My father and I on our knees on Saturdays in new mulch, trowels and soil in our hands, covering the earth, moving on sideways along the inner fence.

The squirrels came and dug them up. Years later, I would write my first poem about the experience. In the decades afterwards, landscapers came throughout the season, unexpected and in force, and sweep through the yard like a flood, leaving it trimmed, raked, and preserved, and seemingly inacessible as a living room couch under plastic.

I want my children to see the yard as endless, like my wife's childhood spaces, the ones that stretched forever into the cowfields and tilled cornrows, the woods and the stream, the dirt road almost safe enoug to walk unaccompanied by adult hands. I want them to feel safe in the outdoors, to own the world of sky and grass and feel like it has meanings both of itself and other, deeper meanings when they are in it. I want them to have hiding places, too. But that's a thought for another day.

The beaver pond and the trails behind are wonderful, and I hope forever think of them as extensions of our spaces, but they are ours to share with the universe, not ours to protect and build for the future. I do not want to terraform, or make artificial. But I want to make this house a place of comfort beyond its walls.

Oh, for a thousand hours and a place to put the waste. Oh, for a mind that can think in whole spaces, and plan slowly a lifetime of acreage management and maintenance. Oh, for a yard that spreads forever, effortlessly, into the world.

Oh, for a wellspace, inside and out, that could make better sense of word or world.

Question everything today. The Internet is suddenly, albeit temporarily, an entirely unreliable narrator.

Except, ironically enough, Wikipedia's up-to-date hoaxlist, a reader-driven attempt to catalog the interconnected web of pranks that is April 1, Web 2.0.

Uh oh. Do we really turn our clocks back tonight? Damn you, April Fools Day!

[UPDATE 2.0: Also wonderful, if a bit thick in the pseudogeekspeak: Librarians claim to discover the cure for information overload.]

The blogging bug creeps up like poetry, words crashing together like poolballs through a haze of smoke and barclinking conversation on the green felt of my mind.

Today it was truly Spring, warmer outside than in. The day had the heaviness of rain but the brightness of halfsky sunlight, the breeze that tousled the treetops never touching ground.

I slept through it until noon, trying to damp down the flu that left everyone else limp yesterday, but seems to have gotten to me a day late, a reward for the care I gave them. Slept, and crept discomforted in bathrobe and barefeet to coffee, and from there to a perch on the front stoop.

So natural to meander outside, a first morning of an infiite homeowner series. As if it had always been.

In our yard so far wasps hover above the tiny rockgardens, where tufts of bright green stems swell with the bright yellows and whites of the blooming season to come. The cat has taken to sleeping some sort of perennial creeper, a tangled green scarf just outside the door.

And the urge for blogging rose in me.

The words began to burble there on the cement porchsteps, mug and well-thumbed novel by my side, but I pushed them back into the still, humid air, stifling the language until the girls crept up the hill behatted and pink-cheeked from their walk down to the waterfall.

This is what is left. This blog, these few uphill photos, and a thousand words now forever in motion, fading permanently restless into the feverbrain.

Just like the thunderstorm, finally here and all around us as I type. Just like the wind, shaken free of treetop by cloud and falling rain, suddenly rushing through our open windows.

Ah, awakening Spring. Ah, cleansing fever. Ah, the rising tide of words, the melting flood of Winter, the ice behind us at last.

Home today taking care of one violently ill three year old, one slightly less ill and able spouse, one fast-moving toddler two weeks shy of her first birthday.

Somewhere in the invisible distance the workplace goes on without me. My students get taught something like and unlike what I would have taught them myself, inviting the eternal question of pedagogy vs. curriculum, a long-awaited nature/nurture parallel.

The child sleeps at my feet, curled around pillow in startling daylight. The wife sleeps restless upstairs with the baby, trying to keep her from illness. Outside, the cat stalks a hundred birds of spring.

It's like a weekend, except not at all.

Which is no suprise, really, because nothing is like anything anymore. Not my daughter's stomach. Not the Web 2.0 that I ask my 8th graders to consider in my absence, the new wisdom of the web so much like the old wisdom before it. Not the lawn, growing grasstufts here and there, where before a leechfield melted into the woods, loam and rock.

The world reforms, begins anew each day. Each blog post is another Spring, an essai, an attempt at worldcreation. Each garden bulb, each new green shoot is a mystery that will solve itself with or without the words to describe it.

Redundant, circular, we wander around Escherworld corners, never knowing where/when we might meet ourselves, never sure whether we should be afraid or hopeful in the face of such possibility.

Is the stomach growing queasy? Perhaps I am sick, or will be. Or maybe awakening always feels like this.

The evening sky is full of stars
I think that red thing there is Mars
And in the distance, passing cars
Weave homeward from our local bars

Poem fragments flit through my brain. I look up vilanelle to see if the form is coming; lose myself in other people's words.

Form is my prompt. Writing is my therapy, my meditation. The blog is what has kept me sane for these fifteen hundred posts -- today's milestone, this one, right here, right now. To give it up would be to give up the long-held illusion that I am manageable.

To blog about it again would be banal.

It was a week exquisite, like every week before. My first experience with standardized no child left behind testing. A beaver sighting at the downstream dam. Trout fishermen and their children. My wife's full-day outing with my mother while my father and I watched the kids. Willow and I hand in hand in the late Northampton sunshine, all the way back to the toy store to return the doll she stole for her sister's birthday.

But the world did not end while I waited to blog it. Truly, a week unbloggable is only one mote off, a tenth of a degree different or less, too subtly something else for words.

Perhaps the world will keep spinning after all. Perhaps it is too late for any imitative semblance of forced order, any organizing principle to make a dent in what is somehow an undercurrent life.

Perhaps the life unexamined is equally worth. Perhaps it is the life lived, instead.

How fitting to have hit my fifteen hundredth post today, and be once again writing as if it were the end of the public life lived. How curious to be alive at all, really. The world turns, blogged or un-, and having been written, moves on.

Life is sad
Life is a bust,
All you can do is
Do what you must.
You do what you must
And you do it well.
I do it for you honey baby
Can't you tell?

I've partnered with all ten seventh grade science classes for three day research and project jam sessions. Contracted to take in tech-assisted students for next week's statewide testing. Committed every lunchtime for full-blown panic-level yearbook development just 13 days to a final deadline with not a single finished page in sight.

Meanwhile, I've still got three classes a day to teach, technology to frame for the upcoming budget thaw free-for-all, progress towards a waived certification to document.

Life comes to a crisis point. I come home drained. This afternoon -- after five classes, a lunch meeting, and an hour of crunch-time yearbook advisorship after school -- I drove home in a fog, hugged my kids, swigged a glass of cold coffee, and promptly crashed out on the bed until supper.

I want to do more.

I went into this because I thought it fed the soul to be the know-it-all, the eye of the storm, the conductor of lives and knowledge. But I go back every day to bellows the spark in each and every one of them.

Because the rest is all paint, really. It is that glow -- the student, not the teacher -- which is the true sheer joy and awe of the teaching profession.

To do it right takes precision. And precision takes it all, right now.

I could do it half-assed, but that's not me. So instead, I'm officially taking the week off from blogging.

I know -- a week is a long time, and it's hard to get back on the horse. But need is need; every wanderer hits a long patch, steep in the dark once in a while.

If you miss me in the midst of radio silence, listen to these two covers of the song that's been stuck in my head for days, and know that this, too, shall pass.

Buckets of Rain (David Gray)

Buckets of Rain (Neko Case)

Ah, Dylan. Can't stand the voice, but the truth shall set you free.

Respective thanks to mp3bloggers Heather and Kevin for the tunes. I'd have posted versions by Jeffrey Foucault and Vic Chestnut, too, but I really have to move on about now.

Happy Spring, everybloggy. May the sun warm us all, and bring us peace in the whirlwind.

Contest! One of the twelve personal quirks listed here is a lie! Be the first to correctly identify which of the below quirks belongs to my old college roommate, and I'll ~~give you my firstborn child~~ promote the blog of your choice in a big ol' one-paragraph entry.

Everybody's got a set of smallscale quirks, the flotsam filler among the personality. Most go unnoticed, drowned out in the minutia of the daily ritual, obscured by the massively obvious facial tic, the distracting roman nose.

Today, I bring them to the surface.

What follows is a list of facts-about-me so trivial that, until this moment, they have gone utterly unnoticed by even my nearest and dearest. Because that's what blogging is all about, isn't it?

TMI: About Boyhowdy

I always take my socks off last.
I avoid soup spoons and tablespoons because I much prefer the feel of teaspoons in my mouth.
I bite my nails sporadically, always starting with the pinkie and thumb and working inwards.
I hold my pencil between middle and ring fingers.
I type with five fingers: index and middle on each hand, right thumb on the space bar.
I carry a lighter in my pocket every day.
I read my fortune cookies without opening the celophane.
I only shave once a week.
I'll eat anything except black licorice and cooked salmon.
I can spell anything if I can write it down.
I match my boxer shorts to my outfit.
I wear a belt because I like how it feels.

Now you know more about me than my wife does. Weird, isn't it?

[Insert midget prostitute joke here.]

I know most people don't care for "look at how cute my kids are" daddyblogging pablum, but Last night's bedtime request was too priceless to withhold:

Can you read this book for me, Daddy?
Which book, kid?
It says Horton...Hears....The...Whore!

Man, I haven't laughed that hard in years.

In more mundane news: spent the evening in Northampton, just because it was time to get the hell out of dodge.

The bulb show at the Smith College Botanic Gardens was small but stellar, but the permanent collection is always a treasure trove: found our first real Cassia plant, stalked the kids in the jungle room, sniffed sweet honeys and dark moss musk, and generally justified the trip.

Sushi afterwards in the scruptious Osaka, where an accident of fate seated us in one of only two recessed pillow cubicles, authentic and blond with hardwood as we feasted on the freshest, most buttery sushi in a hundred miles. I've developed a real taste for sea urchin; Cassia likes edamame, salty and green: if you ever go, make sure you start with the seaweed salad.

I love coming home from long drives at night, sharing comfortable silences with my wife while the kids doze in the back. Soft sounds on the radio and the pinpoint lights of passing cars and distant mainstreet intersections are my meditation. Seven highlights of tonight's mellowdrive, because Bozette asked:

Ryan Adams' Wonderwall is the best late-night driving song ever.

Richard Shindell's So Says the Whipporwill is a close second.

The Waifs do Sweetness. Sweet.

Sufjan, o sufjan. A live two-fer, yet: For The Widows in Paradise and the exquisite LEXP Chicago

Shawn Colvin covers Satin Sheets.

Cindy Lauper reinterprets True Colors on 2005 release The Body Acoustic. You've come a long way, baby.

You've heard Donald Byrd's Cantaloupe Island, you just don't know what it's called.

Also: in the past few days several students have found me, both here and in IM. I'd ask anyone here from my real life to keep in mind that, like your myspace page, my blog is primarily a reflection of my inner life, not my professional life. Please respect this to the extent you are able, and consider all opinions to be my personal, not my professional thoughts. Oh, and congrats on finding me. Not everyone does.

What do bloggers blog when they have nothing to blog? They hit shuffle on their iPod and apologize for what comes up, a la Random Rules feature over at The AV Club.

Phish -- Round Room. Not the best of Phish, and not the best album; I always thought they went downhill after Rift. But decent radio pablum, noodling from the kings of the noodles.

Patty Griffin -- Every Little Bit. Now that's more like it, though to be fair, it's hard to find a Patty Griffin song off her debut album that isn't both gorgeously raw and pitchperfect. Wistful and anrgy in turns, this one'd make a great introduction to someone who really needed to fall in love with a new musician right now, this minute, today.

Victor Jory -- Tubby The Tuba (side 4). I feel asleep to this LP when I was a wee tot. Went and downloaded off the blogweb over a year ago to play for the kid, but she prefers Guster. Embarassing to have it show up so quick here. Still, useful for those long family drives, I suppose.

Hodges Brothers & the Hi Rhythm Section - Best in Town. Blues of some sort. Oh, right -- this is from the Oxford American Southern Sampler 2000 - my father had a bunch of duplicates of this yearly litmag sampler, and I bumped 'em all in. Not bad. They have good taste.

String Quartet Tribute to the Killers -- Jenny Was a Friend of Mine. Okay, I collect covers. It's like an addiction. And I've just discovered the Killers, and they rock. And this way I can listen to them at supper, and no one knows it's not background music.

Shawn Colvin -- Another Long One. Pre-pop from the award-winning debut of yet another soundtrack goddess. Okay, this got me into a love of produced folk music, and through an entire post-adolescent summer of despair, and I'm eternally grateful for it.

Kathleen Edwards -- Nagasaki. AAA radio darling singer-songwriter goes all ani on this one. It works, kind of, and the strings are nice, but ani does it better, and Kathleen's voice sounds more like she's trying to be suzanne vega, but not as sweetly. I don't know why she bothers -- she does a simply stunning Kathleen on the rest of her catalog.

David Gray -- December. Ah, I love a slow beat and a soaring tenor voice. December is a bit slow, and for Gray, that's saying something. Not as emo as some of his other work, though, so perhaps we'll say this one splits the difference.

R.E.M. -- Can't Get There From Here. A blast from the past. Funny how well the old R.E.M. ages. Like fine cheese. Even if I never did quite take a liking to the Stipe whine.

Alison Krauss -- Looking In To The Eyes Of Love. Oh, that sweet vibrato. I remember seeing Alison Krauss fiddlin' and singin' at a bluegrass festival when we were both seventeen. I'm still in love, still far away.

Jon Brion -- Time Of The Season. California Indie piano darling (a new genre which includes Ben Folds and...um...some other male solo vocalists) covers the Zombies. A lo-fi recording, with an audience sing-along, from his weekly stint at Largo. Fun, but nothing stellar, musically speaking.

More covers, ad infinitum. Acoustic Radiohead mangling the first half of Wonderwall. Peter Mulvey live in the subway, covering For No One. Eric Clapton covering Jimi Hendrix. Keane does Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, also on solo piano, also in live lo-fi. Ah, the wonders of the downloading internet.

Okay, I give up. Granted, some of this stuff might impress the right kind of girl, but this isn't my diverse mp3 collection. What's with all the neo-singer-songwriter stuff tonight? Where's all the rock, the mash-ups, the ska, the punk covers?

Look, I got 6300 songs on the damn thing. They can't all be winners.

CNN: Father, daughter can only dream of sleeping through the night.

We hate them because they are chipper.
And not at all pasty.

I get under five hours of sleep every night, drink 40 ounces of coffee between bed and classroom, have another 20 ounces before lunch. By Wednesday afternoons I can feel the burn, the eyelid droop, the slow leak of conscious thought. By Fridays I'm on sugar and fumes.

Give me a summer off and I sleep away the heat of the day, drift quickly into a fully nocturnal schedule.

I have powerful memories of a household awake until three in the morning, my father, my siblings and myself skulking around in nightreverie.

But it's not a personal failing to adapt to the inevitable daylight hours of the public school teacher. Instead, I'm happy to report that the tendency towards the nocturnal is genetic and dominant...and, by implication, totally excusable.

Yes, welcome to the modern world of chemicality, where no one need own their behavior. See the far-too-chipper dad and his daughter in the pic above? They have Advanced Sleep Phase Syndrome, or ASPS, a genetic condition where the body clocks are moved forward -- in their case by about three hours. They fall asleep at 7:30 every night, wake up refreshed at 3:30 or so, and piss the rest of us off to no end.

Because we have the reverse of that, don't we.

Of course, the symptomatic familial result would run inverse from one case to the other. Where Bethany and Clay -- a pair of daytime names if I ever heard 'em -- cite their mornings together as a lifetime of bonding, there's nowhere to go in suburbia afterhours, no shining faces to greet in the dark hallways at the end of a long day.

Hence the slightly furtive existence of my adolescence, knowing that my family was awake in their own spaces, avoiding them into the night.

You might say the differences between our case and theirs is like night and day.

Toilet locations on the London Underground.

Thinking about last week's google maps for educators blog while a guy on the radio explores the new dynamic model for mashups (old: mixing content; new: mixing tools and data to create dynamic content) gets the brain going despite slight illness.

Radio guy's example -- mapping craigslist apartments against Google Maps -- leads to an evening drifting through other examples, from Mashup Camp 2006 crowd fave Podbop (choose a city, learn what bands are playing in town that day) to the vast volume of 1.0 mashups on YouTube (video) and HypeMachine (music).

Family Watchdog lets you map homes and photos of sex offenders. Even Warner Music has gotten into the act, releasing new Fort Minor single audio elements for remix in a desperate grab for popularity and sales.

Which, in turn, leads to a daydream about mashups I wish existed.

You know, like Groundhog Day mashed with the Matrix. A combination of google maps with the current location of all my old girlfriends (with disease vector models to follow, once the demand for realpartners among teenagers transcends MySpace). Mixing virtual blueprints with RFID tags on all your stuff, so you really can have that googlehouse you always wanted.

Turns out much of this can been done, if you're willing to put in the time. Introducing Platial, a social atlas space/tool which helps you build and share "location-based" stories and information online. I found it looking for some examples of mashups to contextualize my own list; currently, it includes gems from the historical (women who changed the world) to the subjective (weird things that happened to me). No surprise: it's via lifehacker, recommended in his own right, and not just for his google maps taglist.

Of course, you do have to know the information you want to plot. Guess the Ex-Girlfriend mapping tool will have to wait.

In the meantime, there's always isolatr, the new antisocial networking tool for those who have had quite enough of the socialweb.

Also Reading: map mashup clearinghouse GoogleMapsMania; wry popcult metanoise at panopticist.

Listening to: Petra Haden, God Only Knows.

We've never been the social type, though I can certainly hold my own as host or jester.

We've been in Monson six months, and we're pretty much unknown here. We go to church, and find friendly faces, but the congregation is too small for us to find families compatible with ours.

The neighbors have no kids, and seem older, established; though old friends and ex-coworkers Seth and Lynn and their daughter Arwen came down for a supper and playdate a few months ago, the old school is too far for us to really sustain those connections.

So last week, when Darcie asked to invite Michelle and her family over for a get-acquainted supper, it was a pretty big step.

Darcie had met her through the neighborhood preschool pals group, so we knew the kids were compatible. I'd never met any of them, but Steve's a school principal, which would give us plenty to talk about.

Still, I think we exceeded our expectations. Their kids are six and four, but Willow held her own, leading them in mysterious play just around the corner, topped off with a full-tilt parade of drum and fife that drowned out all adult conversation. In turn, Cassia impressed us all by choosing tonight to really walk, with confidence, across the playroom and back again.

Everyone connected, I think. We had plenty to chat about as we got to know each other, and our families.

Now, after a whirlwind three hours, our house seems especially quiet.

Back in the boarding school world, the companionship of other families was part of the fabric of life. From classroom hallway passage to dining hall suppers, the line between family and community blurred comfortably throughout the school year, almost to a fault. Our kids played together; we sat with whomever we found at the table in the dining hall.

Communal playgrounds and laundry rooms, and a shared sense of daily purpose kept us close acquaintences. It was more work to find a bit of private time than a drinking partner after hours; that we all tended to hide out in our own homes on long kid-bereft weekends says what it should. But overall, the commune life was more sweet than sour.

When it all crashed down in the cutbacks, I remember being sadder about my daughter's pending loss than my own. That shared playspace between houses was something special, and I doubt we'll even find anything like it.

So it was especially wonderful to see her playing so nicely, so gently, so gleefully with Liam and Lily tonight.

Of course, it was equally nice to feel like normal adults for an evening: drinks in the living room, small talk over supper, all the while keeping an ear out for the kids. Had much in common with Michelle, plenty to share with Steve, and the coparenting seemed natural.

Looking forward to another go-round, though not too soon. After all, we came to the woods on purpose: I wouldn't want to lose that family bond, nor the quiet togetherness that made us whole in the first place, and regenerates us every day.

I miss the boarding community, in part because of how easily it felt like one big happy, hard to escape, always there. But after seven years of it and six months distance, I guess I'm growing to see the benefit of choosing one's own. How funny to be so late in life, and only now begin the work of finding friendships.

We'll have Steve and Michelle back again, for sure, and make it to their house when their kitchen renovation is complete. In the meanwhile, there's room for more, enough to make a backyard barbecue one day, once the yard grows in from the leechfield reseeding. Let the interviews begin.