I don't care what anyone else says about happiness being brought by money or power. Happiness is an empty laundry basket and fresh clean sheets on the bed.

What I'm about to say may shock and startle some of you, but this is not a cry for people to try to persuade me otherwise, nor is it just a call for attention. This is merely a statement of what's going through my head: I'm leaning towards not attending BlogCon 2002. There. I've said it. It's several things, actually, most of them having to do with lack of money and lack of time. I've already borrowed against vacation time I don't even have at work, and there's that pesky issue of how I'm going to pay for the trip and the hotel room and all that and how I'm actually going to make it to Las Vegas. It's not that I wouldn't want to meet my fellow bloggers, since I have to admit to being curious about what some of them are like in realtime (and yes, there are specific ones that I'm most interested in meeting, and most of them are already signed up to attend). And I would hope that there are bloggers who are as interested in meeting me in realtime (again, not a cry for comments) but I still think I'd feel a bit like a fish out of water. It's been hard enough for me over the past few months to be thrust headfirst and quite suddenly into an environment that's completely alien to me where I know precious few people, and I'd like to think that I've done pretty well for myself so far. But I'm a little tired of that kind of situation, and I'd like to remain within my own comfort zone for a little while. Time will tell on this one, though I get the feeling that I'm running out of it. It's already more than halfway through May, surprising as that was to me when I realized it earlier today after writing "March" several times on several different pieces of paper. I think the fact that it's perpetual spring/early summer here has something to do with that, it's completely wreaking havoc on my internal sense of the space-time continuum.