It was a very hot, one could even say miserably hot weekend. So, needless to say, I love my air conditioner. I only rarely had to expose myself to the hot moisture of Doom. Most of the time I could look out on the world and the suffering children, sweating like little pot bellied pigs, trying to look ultra cool in tank tops and shorts and clearly miserable, wanting nothing more than to submerge themselves in Lake Winepausakee and only let their faces show, letting the waters cool them, where the humidity would and could not.

I overcompensated, keeping the apartment at 65. It was the tiniest bit like living in a bank lobby. But oh I liked it. I liked it ever so much.

My office is the tiniest bit warm and I'm dreaming of making it back home to my refrigerated comfort.

It makes me think, though....

The laws of thermodynamics are rather insistent on things like heat. It can't simply vanish. Cold air can't be manufactured. All that can be done is heat can be extracted from something and forced away. In the case of my air conditioner, it gets vented to the outside world, though a series of thin metal plates and blowers. When at full bore, you can hear moisture trickling down cheerfully through the plates, as masses of hot air -- hotter than even the ambient temperature -- are forced out into a world that didn't ask for them.

Now, I know that there are more air conditioners in use right now than ever before. Three times this summer the electric company has declared emergency shortages, because it's so hot that people all over the region are blasting their air conditioners on full. They keep claiming that won't happen again -- they'll compensate for the load next time, and then next time comes and boom, they can't handle it again.

That's a lot of air conditioners. All blasting out heat into the atmosphere.

Doesn't that have an effect? Can you really put out thousands upon thousands of little space heaters, leave them on during the hottest days, and not have the climate or temperature affected at all? Wouldn't the cumulative effect be... well, potentially massive?

What does it mean? I don't know. But heat has to go somewhere, if I'm forcing it out of my apartment and into the world. Sooner or later, these things add up.

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My friend Mason's started his own journal, linked in the frontispiece. I've had other friends start theirs as well, but you want to give them a few entries to get their feet under them before linking to them. I need to remove some of the links, too. Hey, I like all the journals I list, but if someone only writes one entry every five weeks, that someone's not someone I can claim to read every day.

At the same time, I'm reluctant to give up on it. It's summer. Everyone has better things to do in the summer than type. (Right at the moment, I have lots better things to do. I'm just not in the mood for them.) It seems like I should wait until Fall, and then make decisions about the people who've fallen out of the habit.

There have been a lot of metajournal entries floating around recently. Journals about writing or reading journals. I guess this counts as mine, though I don't feel like doing a Raison d'être for reading other people's journals. My reasons for writing this are already documented, and are in the Essays section for convenience's sake. I will, however, mention something Gary talked about in his.

(No, this isn't the seemingly obligatory Third Voice rant. That'll come sometime.)

Gary talked about his plans for how long to leave entries up, versus archiving. And spoke about past versus future.

Wow.

I can't imagine keeping writing this journal and taking entries off of it. That's just weird. I mean, it's like Neal Stephenson says in In the Beginning there was the Command Line. When you put words on paper, you believe them to be permanent. As permanent as the words carved in stone by our ancestors. Words are permanent and forever.

Which isn't true in the electronic medium. Words are innately transitory here. One power surge and >poof< they're gone. Just gone.

Well, when I write on this grey fake-piece of paper, I recognize these words may someday vanish, but I won't accelerate this point. I'll let them exist as long as I can, until they all get covered over with Third Voice stickies and no one has any interest in coming here.

(Why on earth would anyone subscribe to Third Voice stuff? I mean, it's got none of the practical benefits of discussion lists or Usenet, but all the spam, incoherence, and annoyance as you wade through things to get to the content you were looking for in the first place. I expect it to be doomed because people are more crap than not. But that's neither here nor there.)

That's me, though. I fully expect this journal to someday be mined by eager graduate students and bored Freshmen looking for nuggets of wisdom about my life. It's my guiding, overriding ambition to one day have despairing college students forced into reading my stuff. And when they're looking for my point of view on life, in the erroneous assumption that my opinions of my work matter nearly as much as their teachers' opinions of it, they can find this Journal, fresh and ready, and read through it and say "man, was he obsessed with weather or what?"

It's a dream I have.

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For the record, yesterday was the third month anniversary of this. I've had a pretty good hit/miss record with it, and good responses. We'll see where it goes from here.