Blathering on

I remember visiting a friend at another school when I was a freshman in college. One of her roommates had her computer on, and she was looking up something on the web. I gazed in awe at her computer screen and said, “You mean you can use your computer to see things on other computers?” I found the idea mysterious and thrilling, but if I had no way of knowing then what “the web” would come to mean to me.

I am a social being. I need to talk to people, grown-up people, and I need to talk to them every day or I will go crazy and start talking to my plants. And I don’t even have any plants because I can’t grow plants; they all just die. So what I’m saying here is that if I didn’t have the internet, I would be a crazed, wild-eyed lunatic talking to dead and/or nonexistent houseplants. It wouldn’t be good, is what I’m saying.

Sure, sure, I could call people. But calling people requires a time commitment; and what’s more, it requires a coordinated time commitment with another person. TWO people have to be able to speak and listen to a series of complete sentences, and right in a row! On the internet, it doesn’t matter if you have to stop mid-sentence to cut gum out of someone’s hair, and it doesn’t matter if your friend’s reply comes three hours later.

I don’t even know what to say about attending The Blathering this weekend. I originally planned to write something along the lines of how I had wonderful time and how fantastic it was to meet all these women in person. But then Elizabeth went and wrote down everything I think, and expressed it far better than I ever could. So I’ll just say that I can’t imagine my life today without my friends in the computer. I think I speak for myself AND my theoretical dead houseplants when I say thank you. Thank you all for writing and tweeting and going to Chicago to eat and drink and blather on.