Tonight my friend Ted was telling me about the book Diamond Age by Neal Town Stephenson. Part of what the story is about is how nanotechnology has enabled people to build things out of diamond, and so people are surrounded by these incredibly hard, durable buildings. At which I kind of shivered, and he shot me a quizzical look. "I don't know, I guess it's just the thought of being surrounded by all that... hardness. Cold. I think the kind of materials we use say something about the kind of people we are."

At which point we sort of puzzled over the fact that most of the current human world is built out of concrete reinforced with steel rebar. Tell me what you think about that.

After he left, I thought, hey--that could apply to individuals as well. Artists especially, I suppose, since artists tend to deal more with material on an expressive level than anyone else.

But then it could apply to anything. A dressmaker's favorite kind of cloth. What kind of word processor you use. I guess it all boils down to what your choices say about you. And do we ever really know? Is it even a necessary question?

Okay, enough philosophizin' and more scuba divin'. Or plannin' to go scuba divin'. That's right, fate has brought me another clear channel to the possibility of learning to scuba dive. I have a perfectly-sized hole in my summer through which to jump into the ocean to go breath with the otters in the kelp forests of Monterey Bay. Oh, Delphi, let's pull through this time.

12:34 a.m. 2003-07-09�