As I write this, I’m sitting on a Brooklyn-bound Q-train, somewhere underneath the expanse between between 34th Street and Union Square. I’ve had this laptop for over a month now, and I can tell that the insidious creeping of this computer into every aspect of my life is now utterly complete. I can work in the park, I can work at the Starbucks, I can work on my couch, and now — and it is with great terror I realize this — I can work on my way to any of those places as well. I used to read a book in some of those places. Now I write about the fact that I used to read a book. Because it’s all about me. Me working. Me writing. Me typing. I am once more the main character in the story of my own thrilling life.

A week ago, this wasn’t the case (when, as readers of Da Blog will note, I was barely communicating through any medium at all). But last Monday in New York was unseasonably warm (above forty in November! Above forty and then double that in November!), so I went straight from a meeting to a shiny, grassy expense behind the New York Public Library called Bryant Park. I had plenty of writing to get done and no actual, immediate need for Internet access (also five days ago, my forums were slightly lower-maintenance than they are at the moment…slightly). Aaaaanyway, I booted up my computer, and lo! My Explorer browser opened and went right to my homepage. No 404. No “cannot find server.” No “screw you, guy without a plug guy, but perhaps you haven’t noticed that you’re OUTDOORS IN A PARK.” It just worked. Like in that one time called “the future.” As it turns out, Bryant Park is leading the wireless initiative, allowing free and unfettered web access to users during the four total days a year that it’s not too hot or too cold to sit outside in New York.

Well. If that’s what it felt like getting stuff for free, imagine how much more I would enjoy when I got to start paying for it! Within the day, I was working at every Starbucks in Manhattan — I was at three separate ones on Wednesday, a day on which the cost of the lattes almost eclipsed the cost of the monthly access fee — a Borders, and the ground floor of the Citicorp Building on Lexington. Now I’m using my computer case as an ad hoc desk before I get home and figure out how to transfer episodes of shows I’m recapping (entirely by legal means, of course) onto my computer so I can recap The Bachelor on my flight to Vegas.

I can’t decide if this whole thing is good news or not.

Currently reading: shit I write myself, sadly.