to know the beginning is to know the future

Blogging is so hard for me. It seems slightly blasphemous that this is the reality since 1. I am a writer and 2. I am of the generation in which blogging became a thing. Surely, that should equip me with everything I need to fashion a blogging storm and plug away at my laptop for hours and hours! Alas, it doesn't. I seem to go through blogs the way newborns go through diapers. I'm constantly throwing them out, starting over, blah blah blah. Well, here's to attempt number 288397240174.

I wonder how many people (Lorelai Gilmore not included) automatically think of "Fame" when they read my blog title? How could you not? Cheesy '80s at its best, the hair, the Jane Fonda leggings, that crazy, the world-is-amazing bounce. Oh yeah, you're gonna see me and cry.

Anyway, I was thinking the other day about the word know. About how much its connotation has morphed over time. I mean, in the biblical sense of the word it's about a certain type of physical intimacy, isn't it? In later decades, it became something to which you could attribute something to--ie: I know such-and-such a person. Now? We've kind of killed it.



It's amazing the number of people we are able to know virtually without even being able to pick them out in a line up. Of course, it's the "wonders of technology" and yaddi yaddi, but it's so much more than that. It's a testament to our ambitions at making the world a smaller place. At trying to tackle the scariness of a big, bad world, by compartmentalizing it. Suddenly, with the influx of the Internet, you can have China in your living room. You can know someone who lives in a 14th century apartment in Venice without even owning a passport.

I wonder ... do all the ways we "know" people jeopardize the meaning of the word? Does it throw a monkey wrench into the equation or does it make it that much more beautiful? I've mentioned that I'm of the blogging/Internet generation, the Dot Com Generation as it's been dubbed, and like so many other Dot Comers, I held a series of friendships through my computer.

One such friendship was with a guy from Europe. That friendship has grown into one of the closest in my life. We went from being 15-year-olds who chatted nightly across the world to having a proper, lasting friendship. We meet occasionally, visit one another and still maintain a kinship as genuine as any that I formed with people "in real life".

I know it's not an amazing feat, on the contrary, it would seem quite ... odd if I didn't have relationships like this, what with being one of the Dot Comers. It just amazes me, how much freedom comes with the Internet. How many paths I've been able to crisscross because of it. The greatest romance of my life with my loving boyfriend is a product of it. How odd it is to know that at one point in time, I didn't even really know him. Now, I can't imagine not knowing him.