Unabashedly. Joyfully. Proudly. I love the Internet. I love online banking. I love ordering things at three in the morning and having them shipped directly to my house. I love being able to look up random things we're talking about at work to check an obscure fact or reference.
But most of all, I love the people I "meet" on the Internet. And "meet" can mean a variety of things. Some of you know, I met my lady love on Ye Olde Information Superhighway. That's *one* kind of "meet" (ahem).
But a lot of the time, people you meet on the Internet aren't people you'll ever meet in real life. They're blog friends. Or MSN Chat buddies. Or simply the author of a page you arrived at randomly via search or some other happy happenstance .. a page you may never visit again, but a page that brought a small moment of laughter into your life for one moment.
Exhibit A: Tongue Tyed
What happens indeed? :-)
Exhibit B: Lewis Smile
Lewis is a fellow Lensmaster over at Squidoo. We were chatting about my (warning, Shameless Plug) "Funky, Chic and Cool Laptop Bag" Lens .. as well as about a recent experience I had on MySpace .. where within less than an hour of signing up I had two "be my friend, sexy lady" emails. Bleck. Anyway .. this is an excerpt from the chat (I've smudged out Lewis' handle so all of you don't go chatting him at once) ...
Who *does* open our jam jars?!? Roro?!?
I thought this would be an appropriate posting for a Sunday. Aside from the fact that the world needs more laughter, I recall a passage from one of my favourite books, Robertson Davies' The Lyre of Orpheus ... one of the main characters is trying to fall asleep. She doesn't read in bed, but rather induces sleep by meditating on various theological and philosophical ideas. One mentioned in the book is the "Seven Laughters of God". Apparently, Davies also mentioned it in the book prior to Lyre of Orpheus, What's Bred in the Bone ...
The Seven Laughters series is based on an ancient Egyptian creation myth that Hess first encountered in the Robertson Davies’s novel, What’s Bred in the Bone (Viking, 1985) and which tells the story of the creation of the world via a single “creator” god, who laughed seven times and created the seven lesser gods of Light, Firmament, Mind, Generation, Fate, Time, and Soul. [link]
It wasn't quite characterised that way in Lyre of Orpheus ... but I do like the idea of divine laughter as a generative, creative force that brings into being such entities as Light, Mind and Soul. And in a much smaller (yet perhaps no less divine) way, I am grateful to the Internet for bringing me the above small moments of laughter.
