THIS POST WAS WRITTEN MAY 28, 2009

Communication has outstripped me, humbled me, overwhelmed me, and basically made me throw up my hands.

 

 

I’m calling from my cell, texting, emailing, blogging, facebooking, and tweeting. I’m communicating with people I’ve never met in person, in touch with people I haven’t seen for years, sending messages to my neighbor across the street on Facebook when I can walk over and knock on her front door any time I’m home. I’m uploading photos and videos and watching things other people have uploaded. I’m reading lists of random things about my friends and following celebrities who are tweeting that they’ve just gotten a latté at Starbucks and are now headed for Home Depot to pick up a garden trowel and a roll of duct tape.

 

I’m following links in emails to watch funny, horrifying, and sad things on YouTube. I’m watching lengthy PowerPoint slide shows that urge me to support the troops, hug somebody, be kind to animals, go green, oppose the new Supreme Court nominee, write President Obama, and stop buying water in plastic bottles. I’m hearing every day from every store I’ve shopped in for the past year telling me about their latest sale. And of course, there’s that African prince who wants me to help him get $5,000,000 out of his country if I’ll only send all my bank account information.

 

It’s communication Nirvana and communication Hell all the same time.

 

I watched a church service on TV where they had everyone pull out their cell phone in the middle of the service, not to be sure they were turned off, but to text their responses to a survey the church was doing! What’s next? I’ll be able to text or tweet my song requests to my worship leader right in the middle of the worship set? Or maybe not my requests but my comments. Nice.

 

I complain, and yet I am an offender. I’m updating my status at least a few times a day and checking to see what all my friends… and my friends I only know on Facebook… are doing. The more mundane and random the better. Tell me you’ve been thinking about chocolate-covered peanuts and wishing you had some… it touches me deeply for some bizarre reason.

 

I love the knowing. I love the hearing and the watching and the connecting. But I can feel myself losing ground. Inboxes overloaded, messages awaiting responses, voicemails stacking up, and the ever-present blog needing to be updated.

 

One good long power outage and it all goes south though. Until then, I am currently recharging… everything. Cause who knows when I’ll want to tell the world that I really like Lunchables, and there’s just nothing like a sale sign that says “Extra 40% off already-reduced prices,” and the sky is looking ominous from my window, and I feel sorry for Jon and Kate cause I don’t think they knew what they were getting into, and I’ve never seen a kid drink a Capri Sun without squirting it all over the place, and I’ve seen two turtles where they shouldn’t be in the last three days.

 

There. You know everything I’m thinking at this point.