In light of the recent debate about the definition of a planet, I’m wondering if good luck can be revoked ex post facto—my history of coincidence of astrological events and personal milestones is causing a disturbance in my superstitious mind.

As astronomers debate to codify the elements of such astrological events, rare souls have emerged in phone calls and emails to me and others. I feel we’ve arrived at a point in the narrative that demands a restatement of the elementary relationships between the characters before proceeding to the next act like human observers of celestial bodies laying down language for discoveries beyond the Kuiper belt.

There’s an article in Wired on the Indian Space Research Organization and its work in the space immediate to Earth’s atmosphere for humanitarian needs as opposed to NASA’s distant exploration initiatives (I’d rather not comment on the illness of the international space station and space shuttles). If a ‘planet’ is worth defining, if stars can be taxonomized into giants and dwarves of various colors and mass, then what about the human network of voluntary relationships—friends, acquaintances, flirtations, and so forth? Given the disaster that befalls inequitable relationships, couldn’t an early revelation of defined expectations—social taxonomy with universal definitions—avert the disasters that happen when one in a pair thinks ‘lab partner’ while the other swoons ‘life partner’?

Well, aside from the idea being absolutely cold, getting to know people is a weird and delightful process, and it is one that conforms to no pattern I’ve yet discerned. But there’s a process to it, and there are common elements—the August daydream that inspires a phone call, the deluge-like visitation of memory at the precipice of a sea change, the edge of the unknown future.

A year ago, I wrote in a short story heavily influenced by experience about the symbolism of a shared umbrella—in every case of its existence, it has been a witness to a basic humanitarian act—a routine compassionate sacrifice—its beneficiaries shoulder to shoulder, perhaps cheek to cheek, in the barest of shelters from harsh attacks from above (‘above’ in its most general and immediate sense). Its occupants share a mutual interest in warmth and dryness, and though they can neither be warm nor dry, the empathy is perhaps more satisfying.

Six years ago, I distributed one of my mix CDs (actually, the sixth mix CD I’d made) to a few of my close friends. I distributed my seventh, eighth, and so forth in the same manner as that mix—first on plastic (occasionally with artwork, varying in degrees of elaborateness) and followed perhaps a month later by the tracklist, full of pleasant surprises—to a growing list of friends who increasingly knew little of each others’ existence and eventually to impersonal ‘subscribers.’ And with myself relocated transcontinentally, padded envelopes and first-class postage costing what they do, and the iPod enshrined in MoMA, at this twentysomethingth juncture in my pop music autobiography, altering the distribution model seems appropriate.

Behold: A Shared Umbrella. Nearly eighty minutes of 128 kbps mp3 in one 73 MB file.

To my close friends who knew that giddy rush of 24 tracks in the week of our high school graduation, and to the few friends who’ve entered with me in musical dialogue in the years since then, I will dispatch a hard copy of this chapter to your address. In the meantime, those who carry with them daily a piece of canonical industrial design or a similarly featured gadget can listen to it straight through immediately upon download.

Speaking of gadgets that have become ubiquitous in the past six years, I’ve also been ruminating for the last hundred hours or so on the marvel of mobile phone technology (and the closure of Bell Labs) and I think my mind is blown. The fraction of human history where instantaneous audio communication with another person physically beyond hearing range is an everyday activity is already tiny; the past six years where I could from a moving train using a completely wireless device smaller than the palm of my hand (with a built-in digital camera) and a sequence of ten digits engage in conversation another person 3,000 miles away, themselves possibly in a moving vehicle, and using any brand or protocol of telephony (no combination of bold weight and italics in those words could possibly convey the depth of my awe at the feats of engineering inherent to this entire process) are staggeringly minuscule. Albert Einstein described radio by comparing it to the telegraph, using the analogy of a cat: “You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.” And if you think about it, radio is already kind of mind-blowing.

But how would he describe what happens when we talk over a mobile phone? Or how would one apply the analogy of a cat to the evolution of station-to-station telephony? I mean, after the basic telephone, one has to consider the cordless telephone—the idea of using radio waves to transmit from a wireless handheld receiver to a base station before relaying it through the basic wire system. So now, the cat’s tail and head have been cut off, but when you pull the tail in New York the head is still meowing in Los Angeles. Except that you can pull one of any number of disembodied tails and cause any number of other disembodied heads across the continent to meow. And then you clone the cat’s headless and tailless body and make a few other headless and tailless cats of different breeds and send them all on rockets up into outer space to orbit the planet. And all you need to know to get the right head to meow is a ten-digit sequence.

Now consider that in the same six years, the internet has also become ubiquitous, and so I need not fill your head with any more images of cats in various states of disrepair, please take me at my word when I say that within our lifetimes, advances in telecommunications will result in a technological sea change on the level of movable type and a socioeconomic restratification beyond the industrial revolution. Given that, it’s a wonder that net neutrality—an issue currently in vocal debate around the office—is not generally regarded with the same primacy as war and diplomacy.

Anyway. Ponder the revolution as you listen to music on your mp3 player. And it’s good music too, or at least it is in my opinion, but that went without saying.

And don’t take for granted that other miracle of technology you’re always carrying. Call someone. Perhaps me. Consider it a basic humanitarian act. I’ll be a ten-digit sequence on a moving train, and to hear your voice would be the cat’s meow.

I took receipt this weekend of another batch of 152 x 216 mm Green Apple notebooks—adhesive-bound this time, but its interior pages are the same thickness and the rule-line color the equivalent grey of its spiral-bound sibling more commonly in my possession. I make this request of travellers from Manila, and I answer to each traveller why of all possible things I have taken advantage of their offer and expense to only lug around a few cheap notebooks (and a reasonable quantity of polvoron and pastillas de leche, natch). The answer is never completely resolved to any of those travellers, for who wants to hear after a substantial international trek the rantings of a paper junkie? I doubt there are many who would wish to know the answer in any condition, though I resolve to publish it here simply to make it known, and less likely, perhaps to stir among my readership a great demand for these notebooks from Filipino travellers to come.

To first judge a Green Apple, one must know the color of its covers—near-fluorescent green, and not in the sickly brightness popular in the early ’90s but visible from a distance nevertheless. It is a singular shade and remarkably easy to locate with only minimal ocular contact with the contents of one’s backpack. For this alone I might be thankful.

However, the interior pages—the actual writing surface of a Green Apple—is where a notebook transacts business, and this is where I am sold. The paper is thick enough and no thicker. I can’t quantify grammage, but it’s thinner than your average copy paper and thicker than onion skin and Bible stock—it happens to be the precise thickness that allows for but doesn’t necessarily encourage double-sided writing. Neither gel nor rollerball ink bleed through, and the pressure required to apply ballpoint leaves an invisible but tactile impression mirrored on the other side of the leaf.

When graphite is at hand—even hard, 6H graphite (though I hesitate to think there would be a moment in my life when that is the only pencil within reach)—the aforementioned grey rule lines (unlike the bright blue common of ruled paper) excuse themselves to the background of one’s visual field, respecting even the slightest pencil mark. It isn’t to the same extent as Tufte’s ghost pad (thankfully, not even close), which also makes it easier for one to render script to a baseline when necessary but doesn’t fuss a tendency to non-linear thinking.

The particular size is my preference (other sizes are available), which is portable though not pocketable. My thoughts tend to fit proportionally to the page—there isn’t an expanse of white space clamoring for unnecessary development or a mental curtailment brought about by the page’s edge. And I rarely want for a flat surface since it fits neatly on my upturned right hand.

And while I am a stickler for quality (and perfection when possible), my preference for Green Apples outweighs any erstwhile desire for Moleskine notebooks or the aforementioned ghosts—it is, to me, to someone who greatly values paper and engages it frequently, the perfect notebook.

Moleskine makes a wonderful notebook, but it’s too precious. The black covers are classy for bookshelves, though difficult to locate on sight in a crowded bag. And for my daily notes, I have no need of archival paper. While I would gladly take ownership of such a notebook if it were ever presented as a gift, I have no presumptions that my daily scrums with language and accrued information have any right to the same preservation as the thoughts of the absinthe-sucking artisans who made them famous. Archival paper is a resource of such expense (and these are some pricey pads of paper) that it on principle rejects mere musings and demands a proper composition or at the very least a thorough study, which I rarely provide (though that I would hesitate to use such a notebook says as much about my confidence in my intellect as my reverence for quality leaves). Some use Moleskines on a daily basis until the edges are rubbed and the pages are coughing charcoal when they are shut with force, and claim them to be as near perfection as only time in one’s industry can develop.

But there is perfection and there is perfection for application. Green Apples have neither legend nor history and consequently no air about them, which makes them much easier for me to toss and tatter consequent to daily use. The line heights are suitable, the rule colors ideal, and the paper thickness seemingly tailored to the parameters of my penmanship. And as long as travellers from Manila are accommodating my requests, I’ll never be without one. And as of this moment, I’ll never be without an answer to their inevitable question.

I had returned to my apartment to prepare some sandwiches and obtain some fruit for a long, early morning at the office and was on my way back to the Ford House Office Building when, as I stepped the icy 4th Street sidewalk before the I-395 underpass, I was approached by a middle-aged white woman of compact size and sturdy build—eyeglasses in plastic frames, was she carrying a bag of any kind?—who, in the low-pitched squeak of a pack-a-day-since-age-14, uttered very directly to me:

“Careful.”

Walking ahead toward the underpass, the longer of two on my commute, I did not reply and had only paused fractionally to acknowledge her, perhaps only even in my own mind (a California stop, as it were). The machinery of nodding and wishing ‘good evening’ was late to roust, and its lazy foreman scarcely held audience of my conscience as I looked ahead and realized that the path underneath the eight-lane interstate that had been lit every night before this was now anomalously dark—it is perhaps one hundred feet of sidewalk (surely less than two hundred), but from the approach it was a rectangular blankness onto which parked cars were drawn in perspective. The vanishing point, where light ceased to exist.

A chill swept from my cerebellum to the center of my back to my triceps and back up to my brain and to my heart—the other side, a street lamp at last. I stepped quickly to the intersection with E Street, turned right, stepped faster. I hadn’t looked back. It swept again, in waves at pace equal to my heartbeat as it pounded heatlessness into my forearms and singed the capillaries at the tips of my fingers, continuing in the silence of my strides, subsiding at pace equal to the urge to turn my head to look behind me.

I didn’t know I could feel so cold without being numb.