Hey, I am checking in after a loooong absence from Tribe (I can't even recall the last time I logged in, maybe 6 months, let alone posted or even lurked on discussions.

After being away for so long, I can (extremely) honestly say the main tribe I miss some days is EH. For a while many of you crazy, wonderful, opinionated, and generally enlightening, amusing, and sometimes raucous bunch of people were more like my 'true-life tribe' than many of the people I know in meatspace (offline). But the technical fuckups at tribe, it being down for hours at a time, for days in a row gave me a good opportunity to pull the Tribe-needle-jack out of my medulla oblongata and disconnect for a needed break that I wouldn't really admit I needed. Plus really busy being a Dad, getting laid-off, hunting for work, finding work, working, etc. You know, that thing some people like to call "life" (but is really just one aspect of life, one we choose, for better or for worse sometimes. For me, all the bullshit doesn't matter anymore when I hear my kids laughing, or find myself amazed at how amazing the rapid development of language and understanding of children. And to any of you anti-kid people: I love you, but fuck off OK? I know why you feel the way you do, as I have felt & thought similar
things in the past. But all I know now is I love being a parent. More than I ever thought I could. Kids are one of the rare things that give me some sort of faith in humanity, after all the horrible bullshit we have witnessed as a species the past 150,000 years. As to whether we are evolving into some sort of less-shitty (selfish, violent, angry) species as a whole...Well, the jury still seems to be out on that one. Ask me any given day and I may tell you something different. Anyway, I digress (I am good at that).

Perhaps I just swapped one addiction to "social media" for another, as I am pretty hooked on Twitter the past 9 months. It's not as fulfilling as tribe, but in many ways is easier, more immediate, and less demanding of time.

But either way, here I sit, unable to sleep so I decided to check in and see what's up @ EH lately. And of course there are 1700+ unread messages. So many I can't even pretend I'd want to catch up in any real sense.

But I do see a few people I remember, some of my favorite EH'ers are still here (...Come on, admit it, you have favorites. Yes YOU, you do too. You know you do. ;)

What have I missed? Can someone summarize (in 500 words are less, with more brownie points for substance than 'proper' grammar or linguistic traditions. If you are thinking Finnegan's Wake-style, that would be fun too. If you are auditing the EH class, then feel free to ignore this request.

woot!