You've Got Mail!

Seen that movie? I really like it. The part I like best are the emails! I love sending emails! And receiveing them! It's kind of established that I like writing. (Weird that, when I'm not too much into reading. Not a good thing, anyway) So I guess this is not very suprising. But the thing is, I have very little people to mail!

All my friends have email ids. But they also have accounts on Skype, Facebook and various chatting thingies. Oh yeah, they also have phones. Keeping in touch with someone has become befriending that person on one of these websites. Sure it does serve the purpose, you know what they're doing, see their pictures, comments and all that. Beyond that, that special personal interaction that probably defined the friendship fades away.
Inboxes are brimming with messages that people dont read; bulk mails sent to many from people you dont know, or from machines you dont know. So even if there is an innocent little hand-typed mail somewhere in there, it goes unnoticed; A lone kitten staring up at a giant 30 ft high tsunami wave about to crash down on it.

You get your contacts literally at your fingertips. Chatting or video calling is superfast communication. See, this is how the fading friendship thing works. You chat. Try to keep the conversation fun. Talk about what happened or fun things. Pick things out of the top of your head. Inevitably the conversation gets dry. You run out of ideas. Even chatting sessions become less frequent, for fear of boring conversations (yes, fear.. think about it). There's less chance of that in emails - there's more time to think about what to say and as its not direct constant interaction, theres time for things to accumulate and be told in a fun way.
This is turned around at me; "emails take too long" and "sitting and writing them is boring"... To that, all I can do is put on my 'I feel sorry for you'  expression and shake my head. [ Thinking Stupid people, cant spare 10 minutes to reply to a mail. Busy they say, psht!] Sorry becase they have crossed the point of seeing reason in thier superfast lives.
Just by the way, I know more about my friends I have email connections with than just other social networking connections. I have even developed great relions this way.

I like writing letters too! And the accumulation and thinking and writing of things happens better here. I'd love to have my friends write to me... maybe thats asking too much.
Sometimes, I'm called a technologial caveman; going "backwards" while everyone else is moving in the other direction... Hey, I chat, I Facebook (an addict even), I Skype. I just also happen to like emails and letters. Sue me.

Glowing threads

Couple of years back, I was in the park early morning. Probably reading something or just looking around at random things like tiiiiiiiiny bugs, not so tiny bugs, the birds that hop around.. My imagination goes wild when I'm there. But this is real...

So sitting on the grass I could see the sun coming up from behind the trees; you start seeing the gaps between the leaves light up and then the disk comes out. It's early enough that you can actually stare at the sun without hurting your eyes. While all this was very beautiful, that day when I was staring, something else caught my attention - something glowing or a light beam from somewhere. It took me a while to focus on it, and then I realized that it was this one  strand of a spider web. It had caught the light and was glowing. I followed it from the tip of a branch to a stone on the ground. And then all of a sudden I saw that the grass was filled with these glowing threads! Criss-crossing all over the place.

It's a very gentle glow, and I guess you'd need to look for it to find and see it, but once you do - it's everywhere! It was amazing how I'd never noticed it before.

Starting near my foot I looked further away and saw that tiny spiders or other weby creatures had been very busy at night and had webbed up the entire area.. But you could only see the lines where the sunlight touched them.

After a while, as the sun rose higher, the light in the threads dimmed until they became invisible again. Only, now I know they're there.