2 posts tagged “offline”
After I typed the title of this post, I realised thelmabowlen has a blog with the same name. But it fits.
I just got my uninterrupted internet access tonight after I got home from the madness that is driving and (window) shopping at the weekend. So I decided to visit some people's blogs and links. One of the many blogs on my friends list showed a link for Facebook and I recall getting an invite to join. So I went there and immediately also remembered I was Tagged not long ago although it does seem eons now. I checked my friends list on tagged and saw that very few of them ever went there anymore.
A friend quipped, "You have to be everywhere even online, don't you?" when I told him about my new blog address. He has kept the same blog, at the same address for years. He abandoned it, more like. At another friend's and my behest, he re-opened the blog and updated it, until recently. He informed me that he is busy with a new project and could not possibly keep up two blogs.
Much earlier, before I went tagging, facebooking, etc, I visited my flickr page and caught up with my friends' photos. My busy friend with the new project posted one new photo that someone sent to him from Atlanta. I suppose opening an email and uploading the attachment in order to share with his friends is not too much work after all.
I checked my hotmail earlier and saw that I had SPAM... One of which is an invite to B4UParty from someone I do not even know. Or maybe I did know him at some point eons ago. Who knows, who cares?
I might have to re-think about my web presence and joining these crazy sites because, really, where do I have time to be networking with teenagers and strangers when I can hardly keep my various blogs updated given my poor connection problems?
Of course I am not saying I am going to be offline because that would be most uncivilised. I am just thinking about being... overstretched. (Is that the world I am looking for?)
What do you do when you have a temperamental internet connection? Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Apparently, the satellite was having problems on Sunday evening well into yesterday. Bloody hell. I might begin to look my age if this keeps up. Life would be much simpler if only we do not need to be online.
Of course, there are scores of people who are OFFLINE and cannot fathom WHY we are online other than reading emails every other day. We are the ones who do not have a life in the real world where everything is "proven" to be real - people we meet, stuff we look at, photos we take, etc, etc.
Then again, just because we meet people offline it does not guarantee they are any more real than those we meet online.
Back in the day when people actually used pen, paper and stamps to correspond, I had a pen-pal or two.
I met one of them through a local newspaper. We corresponded for a year (give or take a few months; it is real fuzzy now what happened almost 20 years ago) He was active in various sports, etc at school. One day, I showed a girlfriend this person's letter and she gasp. She burted out, "This is one of my cousins!" I thought, Oh, yay. Wonderful. Then she grew silent as she read the letter he sent me. She stared at me and asked if he sent me a photo of himself. I told her no, he did not but promised he would. She mumbled something and excused herself. She refused to speak of this cousin after that. A few months later, I went to see this girlfriend at her house and lo and behold! my pen-pal was there. (I am sure she arranged it so that neither one of us would suspect what was going on) At any rate, he was NOT anything like he described himself. Shocker.
He later apologised and asked me out. Yeah, right. I am going to say yes to someone who blatantly LIED to me. He told his cousin (my GF) that I said no when he asked me out. She told him that he should have known better than to lie to me.
Even if you meet someone at a party, bar, workplace, etc, you do not know if he or she isn't lying to you. I mean, think about all those people who conveniently forgot to tell you he or she is married or have a special someone already and is not looking for a GF or BF and you are just a fun thing, to be discarded as and when. Stupid you go around thinking, "I met SOMEONE. THE ONE."
