I'm entering a contest to win the book Design for Community, by Derek Powazek, online community-buidling pioneer. Consolation Champs ("Top of the B List") is sponsoring this fine competition. The contest? Create a four-lined stanza (ABAB or ABBA) about the book. Here are my entries:

1. Wanna build an online community?
   You don't have to be a power tech
   Just take this fine opportunity
   And buy the book by Powazek

2. If it is a site yer building
   to inspire more unity
   make it shine with coded-gilding
   by reading Design for Community

Wish me luck. Too bad it's not a limerick.

Today is the birthday of my very dear friend Erin N. Erin and I were inseparable in our early twenties. We don't see each other very much anymore. I guess life, not to mention different lifestyles, gets in the way. But I ran into her last night. She looked beautiful. And while I talked to her, I looked at her face, because it is a face that is my same age and it is a face I've known for more than twenty years. And I smiled when I looked at her. I like getting older. And I like that my friends are getting older. I wonder, when they look at me, if they marvel at this change in us, as well. We are as old as our parents when we were all friends and giggling in high school.

I still think we look younger than our parents, though, when our parents were this age. (hoping my mother isn't reading this.). (i should be lucky to age as well as my mom.).

someone teased me the other day. "How old are you going to be, Marya?" they asked. "Twenty-five?"

"Twenty-four," I said. "This is the first year that my younger sister becomes older than me."

And I remember so well those feelings of foreveryoung. Not even giving aging a thought because being young was just part of who we were.

I had this pretty much crappy day yesterday. Restless. Bored. Uninspired. And sad because I won't be working any longer with someone I've really grown to respect. She's moving on. I'm staying put. I'm happy for her. I am. But I was a little sad for me.

So I went out drinking. I don't do that very often. And my friends are forever bugging me about it. Giving me a hard time that I don't join in. So, yesterday I ventured out for margaritas and dancing at Music at the Plaza (the last concert of the summer season). And after that it was on to McCarthy's where I talked for hours with a long-time acquaintance who is now officially a friend. And the whole night just made up for the previous hours. It was great.