Yesterday I spent a lot of the day in an almost disembodied state. When I finally went out late in the afternoon, to pick up the FAX machine and clear up some misunderstandings out in the world, I was actually sort of afraid I would crash the car into something, or drive it through a wormhole into another dimension, I was so completely disengaged from the here and now, wandering in and out of the other space, almost like I was in the aftermath of an overwhelming ordeal.

Part of what I had been doing was software, trying to wrap my head around some code and the lessons I had learned in the Dreamweaver conference on CSS, which shook my HTML assumptions to the foundations and will totally change the way I write HTML from now on.

But the other part of the problem was the real stuff I had exposed over the course of the weekend. So yesterday afternoon I started writing my way into where I was at, using PowerPoint2003, mostly as a way to relearn their interface and see if it really had become an effective "communication prosthesis" like Neal Stephenson had postulated in that article in Summer 2001 CoEvolution Quarterly, proposing that it was a really tool intended for use by people who lack the ability to communicate with others yet recognizes their need to be able to pretend to communicate.

The interface has grown quite a bit lately, but I don't think it provided the machinery to help me unfold the crumpled wad of papers that my heart keeps writing, or really elicited anything new.

Here is how I started: I decided to try to use the language that had come up over the past month to discuss the question of "Why people like us have relationships?"

The fantasy was to uncover the goals and motivations and the payoffs that keep people like me, or like us, in relationships. I did not get that far, actually, because there were too many interruptions, but what I did get built has the ring of truth, or seems close to part of a truth of some sort.

What ARE the goals?

Goal 1: Locate and expose soul of the other

Goal 2: Make it feel welcome and not alone

Goal 3: through touching another's soul, my own feels more comfortable and less alone

Proposed Metrics for evaluation of progress toward these goals

Metric 1 - Trust and comfort-level: The Range + Comfort and trust increases over time? - Comfort level decreases/trust erodes?

Metric 2 - Gulf between expectations and experience: The Range + Disappointments decrease over time? - Surprises/disappointment emerges with increased frequency?

Metric 3 - Overhead requirements: The Range + Learning occurs, irritation is reduced over time - Minor irritation increases – more and more time spent patching things up

Metric 4 - Common vocabulary: The Range + Understanding and characterization of perceived reality of the other + has increased over time? - Illusions shattered / sense of alienation increases - who IS this person?