Voices

Flipping through blogs has become this week's favorite pastime. I get pulled into the the steady, swift, internet current and often find it hard to swim back out again. For fun, sometimes I refresh my browser a couple of times to see the ten most recently updated blogs. The list is continuously changing making me marvel at the amount of activity going on around me, all day, every hour, every minute and every second! Next, I start clicking through the blogs. It is like I am trying to tune in a radio station. I hear so many voices overlaying each other that gradually it becomes steady garbled murmur. I'm not sure what I'm looking for. Nothing and everything. I stop, read passages and move on. Sometimes, I stay longer, enjoying the portal that allows me to peek into that person's life for a few moments.

In my mind, blogging is much more fascinating than reality tv. Here is real humor, longing, insight and passion. It seems that each of us really does have a point of view, a life, a job and each one of us can express it in a distinct and surprising way. After ten minutes of clicking through the blogs I finally realize...I'm never going to reach the end. The stream of consciousness is too vast and too consuming to take it all in. And yet, after I manage to extricate myself from "blogdom", some of the voices stay with me. At night as I am going about my business, putting away dishes or organizing my desk for the next day, I find myself thinking about some of the people I have met in a blog.

I remember the woman who asked "Is a clean house the result of a broken computer?" I think about Seth, the soldier in Iraq who had a street named after him at the newly rebuilt Iraqi airport. I see the woman who had to stop typing her blog for a moment so that she could play air guitar to a song she was listening to. I laugh about a sixteen year's dilemma because her computer privileges have been severely limited because she forgot to clean her bathroom. I marvel at the guy who is documenting a new love relationship and ends each post with "I love you Darla!" in bold type. I participate with the woman who is going through weight reduction surgery. I am lonely and in Costa Rica with a college student who is traveling there for the first time. I share the joy of couples posting pictures of their newborns and I empathize with the couples looking to adopt.

All this, in just ten minutes of flipping through blogs. The voices are astounding.