No maps for these territories

identi.ca’s April Fool’s joke, in which they impersonated Twitter, was my favorite; though it took a pretty deep knowledge of microblogging politics to think it was funny. GMail’s isn’t bad either, though Google proper’s is a bit snarkier than usual. Long live April Fool’s jokes on the Internet! If you ever get committed to using an Internet service that doesn’t pull a prank on April 1, be deeply wary of the people running it and their motivations (Facebook, I’m looking at you). In a telling sign; Livejournal used to support annual jokes but doesn’t anymore; I swear I’m switching soon.

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I came home from a lovely five days filled with many, many friends, visits to the natural history museum and many fancy libraries, fun with Wikimedia work and running around in the cold and rain and long conversations about my favorite subjects out in the sun — I can home late last night from Cambridge, Mass. feeling rejuvenated, feeling like a person again. There are so many things I love about that little city and my friends in it. I told one friend that every time I go it feels like visiting a foreign country to me; far away and set against a backdrop of jetlag, that landscape of brick and rain and square corners erected by church-going men long ago is so deeply different from where I live that it feels like a cheap ticket to Europe, somewhere else. I wonder sometimes if I would retain that feeling even if I lived there.

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I came home to some lovely spring weather, a full 20 degrees warmer than Boston, and cherry blossoms outside my office window. I also came home to some deeply stressful things at work (budget cuts, technology problems) that were in some ways deflating to my good mood, which was discouraging, and in some ways buffered by it. I worry that after a week or two I’ll forget how to keep any sort of balance in my life over such things.