I design a new art form.

I always need an email fix.

I make computers crash.

I tour on the international festival circuit with my zip disks and laptop.

I do other crazy things that unknowingly qualify me to become a knowledge worker of the future (even if my remixological style is to hack into the culture of information and turn some of its otherwise neutral data into metafictional forms of art).

I actively intervene in the flow of metadata and try to put my own spin on it by creating cloudbursts of meaning out of the things I use to tag myself.

I tag myself many things and it's always changing but today I would say that my tags are: interdisciplinary media art, remix culture, live A/V performance, VJ art, applied aesthetics, process theory, net art, avant-pop writing, electronic literature, foreign films, mobile phone video art, blogging, and nature photography.

I look at that list and realize that I am identiifying with all of the culture phenomena that I am currently heavily involved in but if I were to delete all of the cultural references per se and focus instead on what has meant the most to me this past year I would say it is fully embedding myself in Hawaiian beach culture.

I have some ideas on what it means to be cool and wonder where those ideas come from and if "being cool" is something that one learns through "socializing" and/or adapts to by living in the technocapitalist culture of information or if it's actually an inherited trait.

I wonder if geekism is an inherited trait.

I am not really even sure that I am I.

I am reminded of the story by the great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, a very short story entitled "Borges and I" where he writes (in its entirety):

"The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.

Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

I do not know which of us has written this page."

The other one, the one called Professor VJ, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Boulder and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall to campus; I know of Professor VJ from the email and see his name on a list of professors or various blogrolls. I like Thai food, French New Wave cinema, metafiction, my new Prius, and the taste of coffee and the prose of Sterne; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Professor VJ may contrive his blog entries, and these entries somehow justify me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things.I do not know which of us has written this page.