Ken's Home Safe

The day after the heart circle, I sent an email to Ken, telling him how much I enjoyed meeting him and giving him a link to my journal entry that mentions him.

This evening I received a reply from him, thanking me for my note. He suspected that there would be a message waiting from me, and "was not disappointed." He thanked me for the note and the journal entry and confirmed that he's indeed out in his community, and that everyone seems very happy for him.

He adds this postscript: "I must investigate the on-line journaling. Some coaching from you perhaps?" :-)

It's late and I need to go to bed, but I'll be drafting a reply to him tomorrow during my commute to work. If he does open a Live Journal, I'll be sure to put a link here!

Ken's message (and I got a nice reply from Michael as well!) makes me all glowy. It's as if I keep adding more light to my life, making the shadows seem so very small.

DM is returning to town on Tuesday. I'm looking forward to hearing about his weekend and sharing Ken's words with him.

Share the Love

I realized last night, after trying to write about the emails from Ken and Michael, that the way I regard my journal has changed. Initially, I told myself that I was writing just for me, but that's no longer strictly true. They wrote such nice things about me that it seemed immodest to even quote them in public, which means that I couldn't really communicate how wonderful they made me feel.

However, I'm realizing that this journal never was just for me. Sure, I have always wanted to keep one, and had been disappointed in myself that I had never maintained the habit of writing for more than a week, but the real impetus was an effort to emulate heterodoxy, a wonderful man that I had just met in May. Less than a month later, following his example, I started my own journal. I realized that a lot of his friends were part of this community, and I wanted to share that as well. He was my first LJ crush. :-)

The odd thing, as I was writing to Ken this morning, is that I have no difficulty writing about things that other people would find very personal, like my money or my HIV. But these are my troubles, and sharing them in this way is like offering them up in the Heart Circle -- sometimes it's comforting just to know that someone is listening.

Sharing my joys isn't very difficult either -- my joy in my friends, my pleasure in my job. Writing about these things makes them sweeter somehow, perhaps because I know my friends are happy for me.

What the hell. I'll share this bit from Michael's message: he said that I "postively radiated a sense of movement towards joy and peace." Ken wrote that he "sensed a glow and warmth that radiated from you and did not fade." There were more words like these and I felt such a glow from reading them that I can't really describe it.

And now I know what subject I should use for this entry. :-)

Mac Boosterism

I don't know where my boss is today, so I've set up shop at the CyberSTOP cafe near DuPont Circle. As I was walking up the street, I noted a cute man sitting out in the patio area with his PowerBook, external hard drive and iSight video-conferencing camera. Sitting out in the fresh air, chatting with friends or coworkers. Ahhhhh.

When it comes to computing platforms, I'm pretty tolerant. I'm not one of these rabid Macintosh users that give the rest of us a bad name. However, when I see articles like this one: Net Security Threats Growing Fast, it reminds me how much I enjoy using my Mac.

The article says that, according to Symantec's Internet Threat Report, more than 30,000 PCs per day are compromised by viruses that allow their creators to use the victim computers for spam, key logging or denial of service attacks. The most recruits in one day was 75,000!

I've been a Mac owner since about 1989, and when there were troubled times for Apple, I told my friends that I just wanted them to hold on long enough for the next big thing to come out, because Windows wasn't it. Now Apple has OS X, and I think it is the next big thing, at least for me.

My personal computing life has been free of the problems associated with Windows computers for fifteen years. This isn't to say that I've never had problems with my Mac, but I think it's a fair trade. :-)