maybe goodbyes are not so much in the act but in the time. having the time to just sit on a porch and talk. with no anxiety about the next thing to do or what the morning will bring or how sleepy anyone is.

it’s not about prolonging some inevitable or saturating a moment with emotion. it’s about transitioning. moving from an energetic, daily-life-storytelling state to something less-guarded, something with room-for-silences.

and then just one day, just mere hours later, i was relaxed.

thinking gleefully about finding a new place to live. watching movie trailers online. shopping around for lcd tv’s. thinking about flying to siem reap to see angkor wat while i’m in cambodia. working on a user-interface for work. pondering a midnight bike ride. drawing state transition diagrams on scrap paper.

life is grand.

as i am writing this, it is 4:59am on my bedside alarm clock. and it is especially alarming that though i joke around midnight about having 5 or 6 good hours left, 4 and a half hours later i am brushing my teeth and marveling at not having felt one minute of those many hours. i am in bed now. about to go to bed. (do you like cheese?)

i am trying to find a new place to live. doing so in a college town in late april is perhaps one of the most arduous things a person can do.

last night i stayed up explicating my database naming conventions, so now you (whoever “you” is) might know the basis for why i say what i say.

tonight i tried to explain to my dad (over email) what is essentially a continuation of the long-running negative expenses quandary. there is nothing like adding the challenge of explaining a problem to someone else that helps you understand the problem better.

rolled out of bed at 10am after melanie’s party the night before that raged until after 3.

played and lost two games of kickball with my fellow SILSters.

sat out in the sun at weaver street market for several hours with marianne, jason, and jean helping with some php issues. drank a corona. ate some cheddar cheese and a ciabatta.

had a late dinner at the armadillo grill with sommer before going to see crooked fingers at cats cradle. which rocked!

left the concert before spoon came on and went to rebecca’s party in durham (invited courtesy of jesse) where most of the cool sils kids were well on their way to getting wasted. abe wanted bhangra, valerie wanted to ring my neck, jesse wanted to know where i get my clothes, and everybody else was wondering where that cheese on the coffee table came from. goodtimes.

so there is this coffee shop in raleigh called ‘third place’. i subconsciously associated it with baseball, thinking ‘third base’, but having been there once, i can tell you that there’s no baseball motif. it’s just a small coffeeshop, with black and white portraits of the people who work there on the walls.

or maybe the coffee shop self-deprecatingly saw itself as ranking in third place to some large coffee chains?

in any case, the words “third place” didn’t pique much curiosity in me.

until now. i just happened to be perusing curiousLee’s blog (which marianne passed along to me in one of her blog binges), and i saw this link to “third place“. turns out this is a term from the book “The Great Good Place” by Ray Oldenburg referring to an informal social place where people gather–home and place of work being your first and second places.

and I thought, how spot on! this has been my social philosophy of the last two years: to plant myself in some highly trafficked area where i could sit, watch people, (of course be watched), read, work on my computer, and most importantly, where i could spontaneously bump into friends without having had to make plans to do any specific thing.

during my senior year that place was caribou coffee. but after getting a wireless laptop last spring, my third place has become strong’s coffee on franklin street (used to be called the coffee mill roastery) because the wonderful campus wireless bleeds into the front part of the coffee shop, keeping me connected to email and the web–in a social context.

[curiouser even: Ray Oldenburg has a new book out called “Celebrating the Third Place” which Amazon recommends buying together with “Bowling Alone” by Robert D. Putnam.

this is interesting because it happens to be a book read throughout SILS in order to understand the nature of communities and the degree to which electronic mediated communication is wrecking (or fostering) them. as you can tell from the title, the book paints a bleak picture.]