Thanks for the compliments! My holidays were Eh. I hunkered down for Christmas, studiously avoiding the choral festival on PBS by watching my Simpsons DVDs. New Year's was better - friends I met going to Butler invited me over their house, and it was a neat time of drinks and hors d'ouevres and conversations in groups of two or three. I loved that the TV remained off except for the few minutes surrounding the ball dropping.

Real jobs suck, for sure. Slicing meats at the deli is not exactly the best use of my recently earned masters degree, but it's a steady reliable trickle of money. I'm quite sick and tired of Indianapolis myself - the ridiculous excuse for a mass transit system, the fact that five miles from the center of this city there are streets without sidewalks, bad Chinese food, no recycling or civic conscience by government, microscopic work music work opportunities, tiny cultural life. And I'm in Indiana, for chrissakes. If I stay here much longer, I'm going to start saying the nation to our north "KYA-na-da", like a Hoosier.

I need a place with a funky alternate cultural life as well as mainstream.

I've enjoyed getting to know you a little on here. Stick with it! I agree, light would be good. Warmth.