I feel a little like one of those late-night TV ads, where we see the photo of an overweight, schlubby-looking guy (i.e., someone who looks like me), followed by a toned, fit, six-pack-ab’d superman, whose stunning transformation was made possible through an all-grapefruit diet and three hours a day of headstands. In my case, my external appearance hasn’t changed very much, but man, get a load of my right retina!

Here’s a picture - an optical coherence tomograph - of my right retina two months ago. That nasty red stuff was scar tissue, obscuring the fovea (the center of the eye, with the highest nerve density) and pulling on the retina, causing it to ripple and distort.

Here’s what it looks like today:

It’s not perfect - the red shows areas where the retina is thicker than in a normal person. It’s possible that the thickness comes from inflammation, which continues to decrease as I heal from the surgery, which was only three weeks ago. Looking at the cross-section shows just how much distortion of the retina has been removed. Here’s before:

And after:

Those nasty, hollow cysts in the retina? Gone, more or less. The two remaining ones in this image may recede as the eye heals further.

There’s a great deal of faith involved with having surgery. Not only are you trusting somebody to cut holes in your body with the hope of making you well, but you’re confronted with the reality that you’re going to feel worse - for a while, at least - after the surgery than you did before. Despite my elation today, my right eye still has a lot of healing to do, and is only working 20/60 corrected today. (The goal, based on today’s progress report, is 20/25 in that eye in the next couple of months.) While vision in that eye has moved from Mark Rothko to Claude Monet to “Did I put on the wrong pair of glasses?”, and while reading is now possible, it’s still not easy. This process takes a long, long time.

And, of course, unlike the guy with the six-pack abs, I’ve had nothing to do with this transformation. I just lay there, heavily sedated, while Dr. Jorge Arroyo worked his magic. And I’ve basically griped and complained while friends - especially my lovely wife - and my doctor here in Pittsfield, Dr. Andrew Danyluk, have nursed me back to health.

And so I’m very, very grateful and very happy to be (partially, a few hours a day) back online.

Here’s hoping that anyone else who has to go through vitrectomy and retinal peel to combat diabetic retinopathy has at least this level of good fortune.

Dr. Ulrike Reinhard, who is building a new online and offline publication, We Magazine, interviewed me at Berkman at 10. You can watch me squint as my damaged eye tries to deal with sitting outside, or you can just focus on some smart questions about whether the Internet is helpoing us broaden the idea of who constitutes “we”.

Expectations matter. Psychological research suggests that you can drive rats (or humans) crazy by shocking them at random. Give them a light that precedes each electric shock so they can brace themselves, and they’ll get only mildly depressed. (And let them administer the shocks to themselves, and they’ll survive the same quantity of daily shocks with little or so ill-effects psychologically.)

The surgeon who operated on my eye last week didn’t do a very good job of helping me set my expectations. I asked him how long it would take after the surgery before I could drive - he told me I coul drive the next day. This was true, in a sense - had I wanted to drive home from Boston with no vision in my right eye, I suppose I could have. (This might explain something about Boston drivers. Perhaps they’ve all recently had eye surgery.)

My eye doctor here in Pittsfield hasn’t been able to give me clear expectations, but at least he’s helped me understand why it’s so hard to figure out when my eyes are going to heal. Looking at the surgeon’s handiwork on Tuesday, he said, “Wait, there are no sutures!” Vitrectomy, the surgery I had last week, used to require three single-stitch sutures on the white of the eye to close the holes made by the surgical instruments. The instruments my surgeon used are so small that it’s possible not to suture the wounds and just let them heal on their own.

In other words, my extremely talented, very well experienced doctor had never previously seen the surgery I’ve had done on my eyes.

So when I asked him how long it might take before the cloudiness in my right eye cleared, he didn’t answer. “Two weeks? Four weeks? Six?” I asked. “Those are all reasonable guesses.”

He did, however, have very smart healing advice. The reason playing video games seems to help the vision is that the best thing I can currently do is keep the eyes motionless. Staring at a TV screen helps; closing both eyes helps even more. Driving isn’t too bad - you tend to focus on a distant point - while riding in a car is terrible, as your eyes move all around. Walking? Not great, as the body motion shakes the eye - he’s recommending that I ride an exercise bike instead of going for walks to get cardiovascular exercise.

Tenth anniversary parties for your academic research center? Pretty bad, as it turns out. Making eye contact with a lot of people is surprisingly painful. So to minimize eye strain, I spent two days of a conference wearing blackout shades during the presentations, saving my eyes for the hallway conversations. Turns out this is actually a very nice way to enjoy an academic conference. I sat next to generous friends like Thomas Kriese and Beth Kolko, who read slides to me and helped me figure out appropriate times to ask or answer questions.

I’d expected to ne able to drive to this conference. Nope - I took the bus on Wednesday and took the train back today. I’d expected to be able to participate fully. Nope - I was so exhausted by three in the afternoon on the second day, I needed to head back to the hotel and nap before the gala dinner. I expect to go to San Antonio next week to see my wife’s family. But I’m starting to wonder whether the smart thing to do isn’t just to sit at home as much as possible.

If I’m honest with myself, I’d say that I expect to be able to return to a more or less normal schedule in about ten days. But I’m rapidly learning not to trust my expectations.

You know that moment in the old movies when they take the bandage off the patient’s eye? He blinks once, twice and as his vision resolves, he sees the beautiful nurse smiling at him.

That’s not how it happened for me.

As the medical resident took the bandages off me, I saw nothing but a yellow cloud. She covered my good eye, and asked me to tell her how many fingers she was holding up. I saw nothing, not even her hand.

The main feature of the surgery I had midday on Tuesday was the removal of the vitreous humor from my right eye. That’s the clear jelly that your eyes are filled with. That jelly had turned fibrous in my eyes and was acting as a trellis for blood vessels to grow on. So the surgeon removed the vitreous, the bad blood vessels, the scar tissue and refilled the eye with saline.

So far, so good. But there’s a lot of blood, tissue and crap in the eye, and that’s all mixed with the saline, resulting in a fluid much like muddy water.

Muddy water settles, but it takes a while. I used to carry a small vial of water and sand - the centerpiece from an art piece I installed my junior year - from apartment to apartment early in my life. Each time I packed my things, the water would turn dark and muddy. I’d put it in a place of pride in the new apartment and wait for it to settle. One day, I’d glance at it and it would be clear water and sand again.

And that’s what’s happening right now in my right eye. One day away from the surgery, the world through my right eye looked like a Mark Rothko painting. Yesterday, I’d made it as far as later Monet. Today, the world through my right eye looks like a 1950s Playboy shoot, the kind with heavy vaseline on the lens.

I’d figured that the challenge of healing would be forcing myself not to be dumb, not to race right back into reading and writing email. Truth be told, it simply hasn’t been possible. I can’t read at all without closing my right eye, and that’s painful to do more than a few minutes at a time.

And so… I’ve spent the last three days watching the first season of The Wire, and playing Grand Theft Auto. (Not the new one - I never finished San Andreas.) All of which seems to be helping, though I feel like an absolute and total slug. Aside from not using my eyes, my doctor has ordered me not to work out or even go for a walk at least for the first week of recovery. Turns out I’m very, very bad at sitting still.

The good news, however, is that the surgery was a complete success. I’m just looking forward to some moment in the future where I’ll actually be able to see those results. And I’m beginning to get my head around the idea that it might be another week before that happens.

My friend Andrew travels more than I do - which is a dubious sort of achievement - and with at least as much joy in his peregrinations. He tells me that one of his favorite moments is that instant where the boarding door closes, where you have to shut your laptop and power down your cellphone, and you’re irrevocably cut off from the world. For a day, a week, a month, your vacation message reads, “I’m sorry, but I’m in Timbuktu and won’t be able to get back to you in a timely fashion. Please harass my assistant/business partner/underpaid intern instead.” You are, in other words, off the hook.

I share Andrew’s joy in that moment where the phone goes silent and the wifi fades away - I suspect everyone who’s overwhelmed by demands on their time does. (And I suspect almost everyone is overwhelmed by demands on their time.) However, the signature joy of that moment, for me at least, is that I get to read everything that I’ve been saving up for the days or weeks between flights. And that’s not an option for this particular downtime.

Tomorrow morning, I’m having “23-gauge pars plana vitrectomy” on my right eye. In my past experience with less intrusive, laser-based procedures, I’ve recovered distance vision very quickly, but had a very tough time getting my eye to the point where I can read. I’ve heard varying prognoses on recovery from vitrectomy, from two weeks through six. A lot depends on what the doctor finds inside the eye, whether scar tissue on my retina has caused a tear, which would make recovery longer and much less comfortable.

My plan is to take a week off from driving and at least three off from reading. For those attending Berkman@10 - and you should, as it’s going to be a great event - I have high hopes of seeing you there (with one or two eyes) but offer no guarantees. I’m also planing on ignoring the blog and email for the duration. My wife and other friends have promised to help me keep up with incoming missives, but I offer no guarantees on my ability to respond.

Several friends have offered the wonderful suggestion that I ask blog readers to read to me during the weeks I can’t read to myself. I love the idea conceptually, but am a bit worried about asking friends to help me finish reading Paul Starr’s “The Creation of the Media”, for fear that nasty, toothy lawyers from Basic Books will come chasing after me. That said, I wonder whether asking if people are interested in reading academic papers would somewhat reduce the risk. I’d really love to read “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks” by McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Cook (30 pages) and “Self-Segregation or Deliberation” by Farrell, Lawrence and Sides (26 pages) in the net couple of weeks. If you’re interested in getting together with a friend or two and recording a podcast of either paper, let me know and I’ll have Rachel send you the PDF (use the comments to leave your email address and your willingness to read…) (And for any of the paper authors - if this isn’t okay, let me know and I won’t circulate the papers.)

Thanks for all the kind words and good wishes I’ve received thus far and for any that are to come. Have a wonderful May, and hope to see/read you in three weeks or so.

My friend David Weinberger has famously observed that “In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.” (Modestly, he has noted that he’s probably not the first person to make this observation.) David makes the point that fame in an internet age can be a very different phenomenon than fame in the broadcast age. When there are only three channels on the television in a nation, being famous means becoming famous to an entire nation; in the age of participatory media, we’ll see thousands of microcelebrities, people who are famous to their own small or large communities.

David is right, of course. (He usually is.) But being famous to fifteen people is a very old phenomenon, not just a very new one.

I spent last evening in the small, stuffy gymnasium of the high school I graduated from 19 years ago. Like three hundred others, I’d come back to Danbury, CT, to celebrate the brilliant fifty year teaching career of Korb Eynon. Korb was - unhappily but steadfastly - the headmaster of the school when I enrolled in 1984. By the time I graduated, he’d returned to his natural environment, the classroom, introducing seniors to King Lear. His technique included offering himself as a picture of the half-mad king in his declining years. I bet that trick works even better twenty years later.

After patiently receiving praise from five decades of students, Korb took the stage to explain, “It’s not me, it’s the institution.” Patiently - as if we were especially slow pupils struggling with iambic pentameter - he explained that he was simply “part of the Pantheon,” part of an ever-rolling stream of teachers who’d preceded him and who now follow him. He invoked their names - Hobart Warner, Joe Grover, Donald Schwartz, Aaron Coburn, John Verdery - to murmurs of respectful approval from the crowd.

Don’t bother Googling those names - they’re not famous men. This is a small school - in just over eighty years, there are probably no more than a few thousand students who’ve passed through, and perhaps a thousand who’ve shared a classroom with each of these local legends. But in that gymnasium, to that audience, those names resonate like those of biblical prophets or Red Sox MVPs. Looking around the room - my sister to my right, three of my closest high school friends to my left, the older sister of my first girlfriend seated behind me, old friends and rivals scattered about - I saw an extended family, a small tribe. There are only a few hundred references to Korb Eynon on Google, but to that tribe, he’s Plato, Bobby Kennedy and Carl Yastremski rolled into one.

It’s easy to think of this “new” type of fame as being smaller, less profound than the broadcast model of fame. But this older fame is more personal, more intimate and likely much more important.

Driving home late last night, I realized he’d done it again, 19 years after I left his classroom for the last time. Korb hadn’t impressed his thinking on me - he’d shared something that caused me to explore my own line of thinking. In other words, he’d taught. Just like he’s been doing for five decades. Thanks, Korb.

It’s been very gratifying to read comments and posts linking to my post last week on homophily, serendipity and xenophilia. I have high hopes of writing more on the topic, and am currently digging into “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks“, which danah boyd recommends as a thorough academic introduction to the subject. (That link will give you a summary of the paper, which is available in full text on JSTOR, a subscription-only journal archive. You may be able to get the full text of the paper if you access JSTOR from a university library… which is how I got a copy of it.)

So far, the research I’ve done has given me a sense for just how far back in time I need to go to understand scholarship on this issue… which appears to precede Aristotle, who writes about the phenomenon in Nichomachean Ethics, but who may be quoting Diogenes when he references “birds of a feather flock together”. Guess I picked a terrific time to take a month off from all reading…

One of the most exciting (for me, at least) conversations that’s come out of the post was one I had with Brooke Gladstone on Wednesday evening at WNYC’s studios in New York City. I was in NYC doing a bit of consulting for friends at Open Society Institute when I got a call from Jamie York, one of the producers of On The Media, my favorite public radio show. He’d shared my post with Brooke and they were kind enough to invite me into the studio to discuss the problems of homophily in digital media and possible solutions. You can listen to my segment on the audio player above, or on the page for our conversation. But I’d urge you to subscribe to the podcast - if you’re interested in smart, sharp, relavent critique of media around the world, this show is for you.

It was a great honor for me to be on the air with Brooke and I’m looking forward to thinking through these issues a bit more so I can speak more intelligently next time (and so I can be a bit less of a stuttering fanboy around one of my favorite public radio figures.)

One of the very best aspects of being married to my wife is that she shares my basic theory of travel: if you don’t have anywhere to be, you might as well wander aimlessly and see what interesting things you encounter. Which is how we found ourselves exploring Perugia’s new form of public transport, the Mini Metro.

Perugia, like many Umbrian towns, is on a hill. A big, tall hill crowded with very old buildings. It’s not easy to catch a taxi in town, or drive your own car. And the town’s government would like to encourage you to leave your car somewhere down at the base of the mountain and use public transport to explore the town. So they’ve offered an unusual range of transport options to make this more appealing. In a few places around the town, you’ll discover escalators, which lead to a series of underground tunnels and then to more escalators. They’re designed to make the near-vertical hill more manageable to walkers.

And now there’s the mini-metro. It’s quite new - indeed, the locals tend to give directions in terms of bus lines, instead of suggesting you use the Metro. But it’s absolutely adorable - little silver trams, with bright red interiors, running on a red track that cuts through hillsides, ducks through tunnels, over city streets and descends from the top of Perugia down to its suburbs. Each carriage can fit about 20 people, and they’re independent of one another - it feels more like an airport shuttle than a proper metro.

(The Mini Metro appears to be the first of its kind, a project by Leitner Ropeways, an Italian company best known for its ski lift equipment. It looks like a lovely, slick, eco-friendly solution for public transport in towns that are really too small to have proper public transit. I want one in Pittsfield, MA whether we need one or not.)

So we paid our tickets and took the metro to its furthest stop, a vast parking complex on the outskirts of town. I’d figured this was an attempt to get people to drive in from the suburbs, park their cars and take the new metro in. Actually, it’s a more clever dual use than that - it’s the parking lot for the local football stadium. And the presence of hundreds of men (and perhaps a dozen women and children) in red and white suggested that a game might be about to break out.

Because travel’s all about seizing opportunities, we shouldered our way into the line and purchased tickets in the cheap seats - the Curva Nord - received tickets printed with barcodes and our names, copied from our IDs. I figured this level of ticketing complexity - plus the man-trap style turnstiles complete with barcode readers - implied a orderly and regulated football environment.

Nope. Welcome to the terraces. Our assigned seats - a fiction at best - were right in the heart of the passionate local cheering section. It’s not the best place to watch the niceties of football, but it’s a damned fine way to get a sense for what it might be like to be a fan of Italian Serie C football. Right after we’d mastered our first “Allez Perugia! Allez Forza Grifo!” cheer, our striker booted a quick, clean shot past the Sergiovese keeper - the only score of the game - and the crowd went appropriately, expressively, extremely politely nuts. For a bunch of drunk, stoned football fans, they were extremely welcoming to a bunch of Americans, including one big, balding guy who has a tendency to yell at bad calls in angry, Boston-accented English.

We stayed a half, bought ourselves a pair of Perugia football scarves, and took the Mini Metro off to the next adventure. Thanks, Perugia, it’s been good fun. Time to get back to the land of the Red Sox.

I don’t know Europe very well. Many of my American friends took sone sort of continental jaunt on Eurrail, during or after college, and can at least claim to have set foot in the great capitals of the continent. Not me. My European knowledge was, until recenty, limited ot the cities I flew through on the way to Africa or the Middle East. I got into the habit, years back, of taking long stopovers between flights and exploring Vienna in ten hours, Amsterdam between flights, Paris enroute to Senegal.

Lately, I’ve had some splendid offers to see parts of Europe that I’d never visit by just flying through. About seven months ago, I was invited to come to Perugia, the capital of Umbria in central Italy, to participate in the Perugia International Journalism Festival. I was smart eough to say “yes” without thinking too hard about ewhether I could combine the trip with fundraising for Global Voices, research for OSI or any other “productive” uses of my time. Smarter yet, I invited Rachel to join me, something we do all too seldom as we’ve both got crazy busy schedules.

And so I’m in spring-green Umbria for the next few days, alternating between discussions of the future or journalism and walks through an ancient, twisty, terra cotta city. Not a bad mix. And certainly not a bad final trip to take, for a little while. When I get back to Massachusetts next week, I have a month without travel, mostly to let my eye heal from surgery, but also because it’s a very good time for me to stop travelling for a while.

danah wrote a terrific post a couple of days back, commenting on an absurd article in the New York Times that speculated on the health risks of blogging. (Talking about the article with Clay Shirky, he pointed out that article reflects on who the New York Times thinks is a blogger - not the 70+ million people writing online, but the 500 or so people who are writing ad supported, constantly updated, mass-media like blogs.) danah uses the article to riff around workaholism and bad life balance habits in the life of internet-focused people:

I certainly spent my 20s running around like a chicken with my head cut off, trying not to miss a single thing. It wasn’t for my blog per say - it was for “research.” I had to know everything the moment that it happened and I followed web developments like a hawk. My blog turned into the space where I spewed all of my pent-up energy out.

That hits a little too close to home for my taste. I’m sorry that it’s taking me a medical emergency to force me to take a little time off, but I’m glad something is. And I’m glad to have an opportunity to slow down a little bit in the meantime.

Time Magazine has released their First Annual Blog Index, featuring the top 25 blogs of 2008. Many of them are predictable selections - excellent, well-known blogs like BoingBoing, Andrew Sullivan, Daily Kos. Tucked in there between two better known blogs is Velveteen Rabbi, my wife’s beautiful, poetic, thought-provoking blog about judaism, faith and daily life. Congrats to her for this mention, and to Time for taking the chance to introduce their readers to some different and more unusual blogs in their roundup.