Frydmania

I am read…

It’s not quite “I am loved, I am loved…”  But a friend who I catch up with on Facebook, and who lives a long way away, told me that she’d been reading my blog.  And she liked it!

Hurrah for those little encouragements friends can bring.  I’d been tiring a bit of Facebook recently - not much new, too many car races to upgrade my virtual car etc.  (It’s much easier to own a car on Facebook.  You don’t need refresher lessons for one thing.)

Tonight, I go on, and there’s a lot more to read.  Maybe it’s been one of those weeks for others, and having reached the weekend, they’re letting off steam online.  Although another has been letting off steam with piles of baking (which is more realistically generating steam, I’m sure), so she’s entitled to a small sit down.

E M Forster was the one with the famous phrase “Only connect”.  It came in a fairly dystopian story, if I remember rightly.  Our English teacher duly underlined the quote.  All this when there were a few computers about the place, but the Internet was in the hands of geeks, and certainly the concept of connecting was much more about face to face, phone call to phone call. 

So, online connecting.  It’s good, don’t get me wrong.  I wouldn’t be on Facebook otherwise.  Or emailing people.  Sometimes, I guess, the virtual doesn’t quite satisfy.

But at other times…when would I find the time to email my friends about my little ideas, to encourage them in their own worlds?  Particularly when those worlds are further away from my own.  As people move away, lives overlap less, even this level of connecting is good.

There’s a verse that has been going around my head recently - coming from the time when I would write a daily diary, and add a quote at the start of each entry.  I hope I’ve remembered it correctly:

“Sometimes the writer says

To hell with words

And longs to dig ditches.  She writes of this longing,

and you, because you are her friend,

Write back.”  [Erica Jong]

Online communication.  It helps you know you’re not alone.  And sometimes, it helps us to respond to each other, out of very ordinary circumstances, and find a moment of connection.  Amen to that. 

Add comment November 30th, 2007

My bus runneth over

Most frequent text message? ‘Now on bus on way home’.  Or cup on way home.  Predictive text is all very well, but given the number of times I send the same message, you’d think it would predict the right word, eh?

Having now had a mobile for maybe a bit over a year, I am getting the hang of things a bit more, though I am definitely in the ‘laughable’ category as far as teens go.  I don’t upgrade my handset!  I don’t have a cheeky ring tone!  I don’t play songs loudly for my posse to sing along to on the bus! (All these are fairly common on my bus route.)

I resisted mobiles for ages.  Why be available all the time?  What’s wrong with ‘your word being your bond’ for when you’ll meet up with someone?  But they do come in handy on work trips abroad, where the cheap B&B you found online has no phone in the room, or it’s too late to call but you’re thinking of your beloved, that kind of thing.

Another reason to be laughable to teens - I top up my mobile once a year…or so far, anyway.  Given that I almost only use it for texts, that makes life easy. Consequently, when it actually rings, I get a bit panicked.  I can’t get it out of my bag in time.   Dear oh dear, they might say. 

In my defence, I am a step beyond Mum and Dad having a mobile ‘for the car’ but only turning it on in cases of dire emergency (actually, I’m not sure when they turn it on at all, though it may be when Mum drives back from choir on her own.)

Predictive text can be fun though, in emails too.  I used to have a colleague, whose name would regularly default to ‘boffin’ when I started typing it in.  It was a reasonably good choice too…And I could change my name to frydab, or something equivalent, if I get fed up with being Frydman.  Though I doubt it would mean they’d spell it right then either.

Anyway, I am smug in the knowledge that I don’t commit the cardinal mobile sin: to shout loudly ‘hello? hello? yes…I’m on the bus…train…’ and other forms of public transport.  Those mortals are destined for the circle of hell where the bus doth runneth over.  That’s my prediction, anyway.

Add comment November 30th, 2007