I tore the last 80 unread pages off the weighty sled that is Anna Karenina the morning I flew to BKK from AKL and finished it in the air. The ending was satisfying only in that it meant I could stop caring. Here are the reviews I penned in my head as I tried to nod off on the plane:

Dostoyevsky: The only women who will put up with a mentally-overwrought emo twit are whores, and God is rad.

Tolstoy: Bitches be craaaaaazy. Can’t live with ‘em, can’t stop ‘em from cheating on you. Also, God is rad.

Fairly relevant, if you ask me.

I’m back in Auckland now, and I depart for SF tomorrow. I should have written about Thailand, but the country, the city, the people, the beaches and everything else seem beyond description. I’ll try breaking the trip into discrete portions and tackling it piece by piece. But not tonight. Later.

After driving home from our place late Friday night (well, technically Saturday morning), Fonty sent a news bulletin via SMS: “Just saw a guy outside Pecs getting a hand job.”

Earlier this week someone with a great sense of juxtaposition discarded two items in one of the parking spaces across the street from our front door: a single, half-inverted latex glove and a pulverized bottle of Jim Beam.

I’ve logged more than 2,100 miles on my bike since purchasing it in August 2006. I started using it to commute to and from work beginning in October, which was a year ago this week. So, aside from a couple short, recreational rides when I first got it, I’ve pedaled 2,100 miles in the last 12 months. By my rough calculations, that distance translates into around 105 gallons of gasoline (equal, in dollars, to a low ballpark of $336, given an invented average of $3.20/gal for 91 octane), which actually isn’t as impressive as I’d hoped. 2,100 miles is also two-fifths of an oil change. 12 months of parking would have cost me $1800. If I weren’t riding, my thighs wouldn’t be what they are now, and I imagine that my gut would be far tubbier.

As of late, I’ve started to fantasize more and more about fixies. Somebody stop me.

Sometime in the past few weeks my mind was wandering and I connected these three dots:

At some point, “Henceforth” was replaced by “From now on,” which has now been succeeded by “On a go-forward basis.”

I’ve heard that last one a lot lately, and each time I involuntarily gnash my teeth. Perhaps it will never be more than a business colloquialism, confined to bureaucratic memos and the verbal quivers of middle-managers, but I am wary.

On a go-forward basis, I advise you to make your communications as self-important as possible.

Life has been quiet and pleasant since I last posted in November. Thanksgiving back home was nice, Kimiko’s return from London was not a moment too soon, and Christmas came and went without exception. New Year’s Eve was celebrated at Fort Utah with a small gathering of good folks, and North Park has become livelier now that the girls have returned from their studies abroad. It seems unkind to summarize the past few weeks in such a sedated manner, but the serenity and domesticity have been nice.

In other news, we’ve received word that Rage Against the Machine will be headlining Coachella this year. Troy, Mike and I are already excited to go. I still regret missing Daft Punk last year, and there’s no way my high school-self will allow me to skip a RATM reunion. (Unless it was in another ten years, and thus unavoidably depressing and insincere.)

In “Baby, Give Me a Kiss,” Claire Hoffman profiles Joe Francis and the Girls Gone Wild empire he has worked to create. While the article is interesting on its own and Hoffman does a commendable job revealing what a childish creep Francis is, I’m making a big fuss of linking to the article because it ties in with all these thoughts I’ve been having about privacy, participatory media, sexuality and technology. Hoffman touches upon MySpace and reality TV a day after I felt compelled to do the same:

“Francis has aimed his cameras at a generation whose notions of privacy and sexuality are different from any other. Nursed on MySpace profiles and reality television, many young people today are comfortable with being perpetually photographed and having those images posted on the Internet for anyone to see. The boundaries that once contained sexuality have also fallen away. Whether it’s 13-year-olds watching a Britney Spears video, 16-year-olds getting their pubic hair waxed to emulate porn stars or 17-year-olds viewing videos of celebrities performing the most intimate acts, youth culture is soaked in sexuality.”

Obviously, Hoffman stops short of trying to embrace these changes like I half-heartedly did in my previous post, but she sees the same trends. Her tale humanizes the insecure, victimized women that the Girls Gone Wild tour bus turns out, but offers up no solutions or consolation—two things I feel a tremendous need for.

So, the butt-fingering, nudist society is the best I can do for now. Once we’ve all shown up on MySpace, YouTube, or Flickr in a compromising situation or two, will we still fight as hard to keep our personal lives private? How long until it becomes acceptable to post nude photos of yourself on MySpace, and how long after that before nudity at parties becomes popular? From there, perhaps the US might take a more relaxed stance on nudity (as you can already witness in parts of Europe), and eventually public nudity might find its way into the mainstream. These ideas are all flights of fancy, but there are plenty of people already putting everything but their genitals on display on Facebook, and photographers liberated enough to post self-nudity on Flickr are surprisingly common. Plenty of people post nude photos of themselves online, but they take comfort in anonymity or the relative obscurity of whatever subculture they operate within. MySpace, Facebook and other social networking sites are no longer a subculture, and the limits being pushed on those sites represent a new tributary to mainstream culture. The children of politicians are making national news because of party photos that they’ve placed on their Facebook profiles, and Tila Tequila was vaulted into C-list stardom because she posted slutty photos of herself on MySpace and recruited a hundred thousand fans.

I think nudity has its place in utopia, but I can’t shake this whole attention whore aspect that the influence of reality TV brings to the table. Freedom from shame isn’t really freedom if you’re sharing your private sphere out of a desire for attention.

Let’s all go skinny-dipping, but let’s do it because it’s fun. No cameras allowed.