Or at least how Neo might have felt after those downloads in the Matrix. This weekend has been a nonstop shoving of new impulses into my synapses - it's been so long since I could speak so fluently, and so quickly... know. I've been in perpetual flow-mode since late on Friday night when Greg and Andy saved me from shivering away at South Station. So many different people, conversations, lack of sleep, debates in cars, over food, late at night on the verge of passing out, hallway convos that turned into things far longer.

It's too much input to process or even to express, so I've been trying to write snatches of it down and store them into trigger associations in my mind ("when you see this thing at work, remember to do X") so they can come back later, when I have relax-time. I'm a global learner (or at least I've found that a useful framework for understanding my brain so far), which means I dump lots of information in! and then process it... subconsciously, filtering through the background, to emerge as nuclear explosions of coherence hours or weeks or even years later. We'll see what this one does.

I have missed this. There are different levels of being able to speak the language of the people you're with, and I've managed to find ways to get closer to achieving grokness with a wider range of people especially in the past 12 months - and it's a challenge well worth tackling - but there's just something nice about being able to slip for a tiny time into a community of people on your wavelength, and come out again knowing you're not the only one that does X in the world. You know that's true intellectually beforehand, but until you get this bidirectional bandwidth dump of glory to remind you (every so often), it feels a bit like some far-off unicorn-like vision you dreamed of but never actually touched.

Removing that resistance and just sprinting out communications free and clear, as fast as you can go, where the limits you hit aren't the speed at which you can convey this stuff to others, but how fast you can think. I can't keep this up for extended periods of time - I'd go lossy and have no time to digest and produce Useful Stuff - but I do need to do this every once in a while. The fast lane's just as needed as the slow.

Having caught my breath, I'm off again. There's a 2AM Tuesday bus from Boston to New York - it'll get me to the city early enough to wander around Manhattan for the first time. Then hopefully I can make a Python meetup for the first time tomorrow evening... and then sleep, somewhere.