Sunday, August 28, 2005

I love this time Almost every evening, or, at least, every evening when the children go to bed on time, and the H and I aren't hanging out together (either because he has to work, or we just want some (rare, for me anyway) time to ourselves, I retire to my office off the kitchen, read email, look at the stacks of paperwork on my desk, and then shove them aside to settle in with my virtual world travels via others' blogs. Even though most of the blogs I read are, yeah, mommy blogs, some aren't. One's a college student in Texas. Another is a musician/MTV News producer in NY. Another is a minister. You get the idea. I have this vicarious experience of radically different lives, and yet always, always, I find the common threads. Younger people are feeling the same conflicts and passions I remember. Single people are slogging through the slings and arrows of dating. (Ok, some of them are having more exciting experiences than I mostly did. Mostly.) But (and I know, I know, I am not saying anything at all original here) I feel a community and a commonality across the wires. And that moves me. Jesse Kornbluth has an interesting piece addressing an aspect of this, the idea that we are forming unique communities here on our screens, ones which rely not at all on institutions, and absolutely on individuals. This, of course, is true for the parent bloggers, too. I read other moms' words to laugh, to shudder, to feel and most of all, to experience the odd solidarity that comes from knowing that all over, at whatever distance, you're in it, too. 11:39:40 PM     comment [] trackback []