Long Distance Relations

I’m at a wedding reception in Canada, virtually. To be possibly a little more accurate, I’m watching some friends be drunk in Canada, via webcam over Ustream. Feels a little weird. The video is all right. A bit jerky maybe, but watchable. It sounds though like a circus. A circus on acid. In a swimming pool. On board a submarine. Between the slow video and the strange out-of-sync audio effects, it feels like trying to communicate with astronauts. But what the heck. I mean, they’re at a wedding reception. I’m probably not missing a lot of sparkling conversation.

And it’s one-way of course, so they can’t see or hear me at all. We’re communicating through the system’s “instant messaging” service. In quotes, because it’s taking even longer for the IMs to pass back and forth than it is for the video. Something wrong with that. It only adds to the Apollo mission feeling.

Moving nonetheless. A whole bunch of people, some of whom I haven’t seen in years, some of whom I’ve never actually met, all of whom I’ve gotten to know over the last decade or so purely through the Internet. People from other countries, who by other means I’d have met briefly if at all, but now are a community I belong to. A real community, despite being bound only by threads of data, with all the things that appertain. Indeed, this is how the happy couple met.

I love being alive at this time.

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