The current ad up on both sides of the phone booth across the street from Teachers College is for the Nintendo DS Lite. It features a woman of color, against a white background, joyfully holding her stylus at the ready over the little console's touch screen as crayon-colored 3D characters from Super Mario Brothers fountain forth from it. Lighter, it says. Brighter.

On my way home in the dark last night I was struck by the promise of this ad in a way I would never have been before yesterday. Its brightness held me, and I found myself smiling, thinking kind of stupidly, That could be mine.

At exactly that moment I nearly ran into a girl of about nine years old who was crossing the other direction, holding her mother's hand. Long-haired, blue eyed, she looked up at me, and as if she were confident she knew me, said, "Hello."

"Hi," I said back to her. And I thought, Dude. Totally. Yes.

yeah. so if you want to know what I'm being all cryptic about, you're going to have to check back in in a couple of months. watch this space.

* * *

In mostly unrelated news, you know you've been working too hard when... for some reason I dreamed last night that my grandma -- the no nonsense one -- was offering to drive me and a group of colleagues, including Ian Bogost, for a night out on the town (town being either Old Town Pasadena or the San Antonio Riverwalk, not quite sure). They were all being altogether too rowdy for her taste -- she has to focus when driving! -- and Ian was being the rowdiest, I'm not sure why, even though the rest of the group may have been the hackers I went out with a few weeks ago. Ian's presence in my dream doubtless has to do with the fact that I'm reviewing his new book for the TC Record. If you've met Ian or heard him speak, you end up with the uncanny feeling after reading a few chapters that you've actually been hearing him talk about all these ideas -- it's one of those rare academic books in which the author's voice seems to come through. Strong authorial presence translates to shouting in grandma's car in dreams? who the hell knows.

So there he was, and somehow by the end of the evening everything ended up in the narrated third person and all of us were running through an office building trying to escape some shadowy Yakuza types.