D'vorahDavida
Yetzirah

(I'm sad alright.)

Several things ran through my warped brain while checking my email for the umpteenth time .....  One of them was that I don't have email addresses socked away somewhere where I can get ahold of some of you at times like this. That is going to be remedied as soon as we are up and running. I'm making a list in a diary somewhere so I next time Dear Diary is down for some major overhaul, I can email you and whine about it.  Another thing is that when DD is down. I don't GET any email. (Well, not totally no email, but virtually no email. I think I have three today, and two were forwards from Hub Man. I'm not sure how I feel about that. Does that mean something?

Then another thing that I thought about was, what if DD was..... Irretrievable. What would that mean? Now I don't know about you, but I print out my diary entries once a month and keep them in 3 ring binders. Anal? Yep. But it makes me feel better. I want my grandchildren to know just what a nut case their grandmother was back in the day.

BUT, I got to thinking, wow, I would have lost all of July's entries because I haven't printed them out yet. That was a job for tomorrow. And my next thought was... Oh well!  That's life with computers. This data is vulnerable.

Get used to it.

Get over it.

And that  made me wonder about the level of transience that we are willing to tolerate these days. I used to fret quite a bit about it, but I think I am resigned to the inevitable. Everything is changing at light speed, nothing feels permanent, and I suppose the next step will be that nothing will feel real.

(Please don't go there. Somebody distract her quick.... Where ARE you people?)

Everyone used to save old letters from friends and family. Shoot, history books have been written from those kinds of letters. But what will we have to show for all our communications with each other? I don't know about you, but I stopped printing out emails a long time ago. At first I printed every one, (back in the the early 90's). After all, it was a letter right? We should save them, right?  But the nature of the emails themselves after a while did not seem to warrant such care and attention. My emails, both the recieved and the sent were of a much more trivial nature, filled with goofyisms and smart aleck remarks. Who wants to waste paper and ink on something like that?

We used to have plenty to say in a real letter because weeks, sometimes months had gone by since we last wrote, we tended to draw out the more pertinent ideas and things to share. Or we wrote more about things we had been thinking deeply about. But emails are a different animal altogether. Written on the fly, responding to perhaps just one question we have been asked, and besides, I just emailed you 30 minutes ago. How much time is that to develop any kind of meaningful philosophical point?  Well, not much, that's what.

Anyway. I realized that losing a month's worth of diary entries would not have upset me much. And that bothered me. If I'm not attached to them, they must not have much value. Or is it the other way around? They don't have much value because I'm not attached to them.

For some of us, if the data was truly lost in cyberspace, our "existence" here at DD would be purely anecdotal. Carried only in the memories of those who had read us. Now in some ways, this is going many steps backwards in human development. Oral history was the thing way back when. And in some respects, we have made ourselves vulnerable to falling back into that by relying so heavily on this electronic medium. Our words could easily be lost, and only end up being passed on by word of mouth.

"Ah yes, I remember that Yetzirah character. She was one warped little cupcake. I wonder what ever happened to her?"

(Loony Bin no doubt.)

Say what you will about cutting down trees. I for one am heartily thankful we still have the hard copy of the Declaration of Independence to gaze upon. It's not anecdotal, it's real.

And another thing this little disruption of communication has brought to my attention, is that I am suffering from a mild case of separation anxiety. Even though I only see a handful of you in person EVER.
Sigh. So many things to think about. So little bandwidth available.

Anyway, my thoughts are not remaining in a coherent bundle at the moment, so I better quit.  I'm typing this into Bloggar, so it will be ready to post as soon as Dear Diary is back up and running.

Okay, so, well, I sure hope to 'see' you around soon.

Real soon.