My rooms are seasonal, the conceit being a mysterious house which contains the year within it. Visitors will be tempted to wander from room to room to find their favorite month. The Winter Parlor evokes snow, crimson, velvet, firelight, gingerbread, the eve of the winter solstice. The Summer Porch is redolent of faded cotton, sunflowers, crickets, cold lemonade, the deep saturated colors of early July. I love creating rooms for virtual reality. I've always found such joy in working out how to bring a mood or a period to life in text. And in not very much text, either. You can't overload a room's description or most people's eyes glaze over and they stop looking.

I sometimes think I could become passionate about interior decoration considering how much work I put into the rooms I design online. I've had subscriptions forever to magazines like World of Interiors and Architectural Digest and Colonial Homes. I notice color and texture. It matters to me whether something makes design sense. I genuinely can't bear a certain kind of casual ugliness. I find a lot of color combinations deplorable. Ask my husband. I averted my eyes every time he wore his favorite pair of mint green shorts for years. I was so happy when they finally wore out. Trust me, nothing looks good with mint green except solid colors, something John does not gravitate towards in his wardrobe.

Anyway, my fantasy is that someday I will take one of those adult education courses on interior design and just wallow in learning. Ideally, I'd sign up with Sotheby's or Parsons or even Oxford, somewhere really classy, but I'm far more likely to take it at a community college nearby. It's probably a natural progression from telling people where to vacation to telling people how to decorate their homes. I feel immensely gratified when I help a client create the perfect holiday. In a way I'm creating a little fantasy room for them, one in which the food is always prepared on time, the drinks are always cold, the weather is perfect, everyone is good looking, well dressed, and friendly, and mysterious unseen creatures take care of all the boring things like making the beds and doing the dishes.

Of course, there's also the delusional guy who thinks you're interested in him just because you stood next to him at the bar, and the mouthy teenagers who hate everything on principle and don't hesitate to inform the room about it, and the slight disorientation associated with trying to get your bearings in a totally new place. Just like the MOOs and MUDs, really. Virtual reality is a way of getting away from the routine, only with vr you don't have to pack. You can just sit down, fire up a telnet connection, and be magically whisked away. On Halloween, for instance. Come to the Halloween Ball at the Moon Palace, and wander the aether with us. We promise it will be a beautiful experience.

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