There are a couple of new beginnings ahead of me. One is technical. I am learning LaTeX, the word along which used to cause me great fear and angst because I have been told by every other geek that I MUST write my dissertation in LaTex. They are right. It rocks and though I have a waysSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS to go, I am seriously contemplating using it. I mean, it makes your work look way better than it is! Like I converted my IRC talk into a pdf using LaTeX and it looks so much better.

Otherwise, my life is rightside up and upside down as I try to get out of SF to get to Puerto Rico. I am anxious to go because my mother has been sick for a long time and I have felt out of sorts being so far not knowing really how she is doing in that in your face sort of way. So I leave SF with both saddness and happiness for PR which I anticipate with the same mixture of heightened, contradictory emotions. I am tired from months of the anticipation of arranging my life so I can go home for a long period of time. I am not sure how I will react to my mother’s illness although I also know that being there is where I am supposed to be.

Illness clarifies so much about the human condition and the social condtion that it is a shame that we tend to hide or privatize illness. I think of it as one of the greatest teachers and humanizers. I feel very lucky that I can go home for a long period of time and think about how constrained most people are to jobs so that when illness befalls a family member, there is not much choice one has but to quit a job if one wants to spend time with a person. There is just very little room to make accomodations for people with illness and those around them in this society.

And as much as I can’t stand utopian rhetoric around the net, I do think that when it comes to the experience of illness, net technologies are a great facilitator in so many dimesions that it scares me to think of a net that is any less accessible and user friendly. That is, my politics to equalize access, support community, to promote user-friendliness, is largely derived from a year when I was sick, nearly home-rideen for 6 of those months. I was glued to the net. It was a place to go when I could literally not go out of the house much and it was one of the most significant factors to help me figure out what was wrong with me. And it was truly amazing to have full fledged, fullfilling interaction all the while I felt that my body was failing me. When you are so sick, it is hard not to feel like you are at war with yourself, engaged in an existential battle trying to figure out, what am I? My body, my mind, my self, my emotions. Abstract philisophical contemplation seems so aburd as you struggle through those questions with fevers and fatigue.

There is a lot of anger that emerges often directed at your failing body, while you struggle to heal it and define the self in relation to the out of roder chaos. Sharing this experience with others is a way to get over the personal war. You see and hear and share the stories of others which makes you realize that your body is not just attacking you but that illness is franlky part of the human condition write large, that there is somehting to learn from it and it is more than just you and your body even if that is a reality that should never be denies And then the experience of interacting with others in ways that are pretty intimate given the bodily details of illness and its emotional counterparts, you realize that even if there are limits placed on you, it is not social death, a very important reminder when you are so ill. It is one case on the net in which denial of the physical body is a good thing and it is a denial that teach you that you really are not just your physical body.