Photo by CairnsDining / by BY-NC-SA 2.0

Actually, I’ve become a coffee shop john if we’re going to make the prostitution analogy correctly. I’m the one paying, after all. I’ve been freelancing full-time for 21 months now. (And I’m still not broke! I know, I’m as shocked as you are.) As nice as it is to sleep late, take vacation days without need of approval, and to crash on the couch in the afternoon if my headache has my brain in a headlock, it can get lonely if you let it. Hypothetically, if I had enough groceries I could stay in my apartment for days, if not weeks, at a time. That’s great if there is a nuclear incident in my vicinity. All I’d have to do is duct tape the windows closed to protect myself from stray neutrons. But it can also get rather claustrophobic and boring no matter how many movies I can watch on Netflix streaming.

Lately I’ve been going to coffee shops to work. A lot. Like, way more than I ever did [...]

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You’d expect the photo above to be in black and white with tattered edges, because that phone is ANCIENT. The Mayans had cell phones like that. Sadly, I also have a cell phone like that. Oh, my poor little cell phone! Once it was the shiniest, coolest gadget on the block. Then two minutes later it was complaining about arthritis and napping in the early afternoon.

I may work in information technology, but I am not a gadget person. My philosophy towards electronics is to keep it until it breaks. The Kindle and the iPad look nifty and all, but I feel no need to buy either one. However, iPads and Kindles are still rather rare, whereas smartphones have recently hit a saturation point. It seems like everyone has one. My friends are always whipping out their phones to check Twitter or Facebook or send messages on their QWERTY keyboards or to run the latest app or Google the answer to a question that has come up over dinner or to show me video of [...]

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