I AM STILL ALIVE. I've been going through a minor writing crisis lately. All of my energies have been focused on being the resident smart-ass on ILXOR (MOM AND DAD DO NOT CLICK) and have been finding it difficult to muster either time or energy for the blog. Bad Dan, I know. Now the budding readership I was slowly accumulating has drifted away and I'm back to amusing myself. WHICH IS FINE. The fewer people who read my stream-of-consciousness ramblings dressed up as a burnt-orange vanity project, the more likely I am to start writing again. Besides, I need to regain my discipline. I've turned myself into the type of person who dashes off three lines in response to a question (two of which are there solely to support a bad joke) and hits "Submit". I've lost the ability to sit down and write a piece of length or depth.

I intend to change that.

Now that I have broadband at home, I should be able to update at home. I need to force myself to get my thoughts down, especially on music. The three people who stumble across this site during the week don't know that I went through a period of rediscovery with The Monkees earlier this month, cementing them as one of the best bands from the 60s in my mind. (Not many bands had songs as brilliant as "Pleasant Valley Sunday", "Star Collector", "A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You", "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", "The Porpoise Song", "Stepping Stone", "She", "Words", and "Valleri". And those aren't even all of their brilliant songs!) You also don't know that I've been listening to the new Poem-Cees CD _Paranoia_ non-stop since Christmas Eve and finding it brilliant. (Hip-hop needs more songs about child molestation and vigilante drug-dealer executioners.) I've been diving through Neverwinter Nights and enjoying playing a role-playing game as a character that isn't a fighter or mage. (My character's a female ranger. Female because I was bored, a ranger because I wanted the animal companion.) You don't know that one of my best friends in the entire world has started a blog that has some wildly funny links on it so far. You don't know that I've become OBSESSED with b3ta and its attendant family of deranged websites.

You also don't know about my singing. You don't know that my wife and I joined a professional church choir in Boston. You don't know that I've gotten more solos with our chamber group than I've ever had in my life. (YAY TO MY VOCAL EGO!) You don't know that I had to give up the opportunity to sing a world premier in Carnegie Hall with the BSO to pay my wife's grad school bills. You don't know that my wife is looking at starting off grad school with a 4.0 (not official yet, but all signs point towards it) or that she's going to play Belinda in a production of "Dido and Anaes" over Memorial Day weekend. THERE'S SO MUCH TO TALK ABOUT.

So I guess I'd better start talking, huh?