To my credit, I'm not entirely shameless...

Because I know that if I stop updating, people will stop reading, I will post another entry. If that isn't a lame reason to post an entry, I don't know what is. I'm a little ashamed to admit that with constant internet access and little else to do, my Site Meter, a web page that tells me how many people are visiting my blog, is one of the most exciting aspects of my life right now. (Yes, that's right, I'm watching you. But don't worry, Site Meter doesn't provide me with names, and even if it did, I don't judge. After all, I'm the one who now visits facebook.com (a site that I vaguely recall thinking I had outgrown about eight months ago) upwards of twenty times a day. That leaves me precious little room to judge anyone else's internet habits.)

All this internet is definitely one of the weirdest things about suddenly being plunked back down in the U. S. of A. At first, I felt (predictably) internet-starved in Russia. The feeling didn't go away quickly - probably because, as a recent college graduate, I'm a member of the most internet-dependent demographic in America, and because I was going through the awful post-college loneliness we all seem to have felt a bit of once we set sail upon life's seas. But by the time I left Vladivostok I had just gotten to the point where internet felt more like a necessary chore than a delight. I say "chore" not because I dragged myself unwillingly to the internet cafe - that is certainly not true - but because I had come to see my posts, emails with friends, and poppings-in on the blogosphere not as lifelines, but as the simple motions it was necessary (and pleasant) to keep going through if I wanted to stay in contact with the people I cared about. I guess you could say I stopped craving an internet connection just for the sake of being online, and started looking forward to individual connections - an email from a friend I was waiting to hear from, or an update to a favorite blog.

In retrospect, I prefer that kind of relationship to the internet to the kind I have now, or the kind I (and most everyone else I knew) had in college. Perhaps when I move back to the States for real, I won't get internet in my apartment.

Oh, and how am I doing? I'm fine. I had surgery on Tuesday, as indicated in the last post. I've been getting progressively better, by which I mean I've been taking progressively fewer dangerously addictive opioid painkillers, and we're hoping tomorrow I'll be able to crutch around painlessly enough to take a shower. I know my hair would be happy. The good news is that they discovered in surgery that my knee wasn't as bad as they thought it might be - no serious cartilage damage, and not nearly as many bone chips (yuck) as they expected to see. So, physical therapy can maybe start a little sooner than they thought. For now, my eyes are on the prize, and that prize is next Friday, which is my first post-op doctor's appointment, when they'll remove my bandage. Hooray!