On Technology & Communication

Sometimes, email is not enough. I feel like reverting to letter writing for my distant friends. Something about ink on paper and the effort of writing without the ease of erasing, cutting and pasting, and emoticons generates a more thoughtful prose.

Here we are in the electronic age, faced with all these gizmos but nevertheless not communicating enough and I become nostalgic for a time when communicating was less easy, so we thought to do it more often.

I don't email my distant friends frequently, and when I do, it is in brief and then briefer messages. It has been a long time since I have used the telephone to have a lengthy chat.

Instead, I have this blog. I keep discussing with myself why I am posting, what it all means, why I am spending my time like this. On the one hand it has been good because I am writing more often now, and I regularly write things that do not go onto any blog but languishes inside my computer. On the other hand, so much time goes into blogging and I am not certain I know what the value is yet.

It is very easy then, for blogging to be paused while the rest of my life takes over. And that is the explanation for my silence of the past few weeks:

Life has been interfering.

I have had much opportunity over the past few weeks of observing and participating in my family. We've been sending each other lengthy group emails and then calling family meetings at the Accountant's house. Well, actually I've been sending lengthy group emails. At our meetings I am so much less eloquent than I am in writing. I become surly, speak in short sharp sentences, become unwilling to proffer my opinions. Inconsequentially I will make irreverent remarks and no one will find me amusing. Eventually I flounce off announcing tiredness or a long day at work.

It is as if, in person, I revert to my role as the youngest - the least authoritative, the most petulant. Unfortunately, I am probably also the one who understands what is going on best - but I can only communicate it in crisp, business-like emails with numbered paragraphs, attachments and highlighted sections directing my siblings' attention to things "to be actioned."

It is bizarre and I don't understand it.

All this technology is warping me.