Something to Talk About

When my husband went off to Detroit this weekend for his mother’s 91st birthday, he took his laptop. To his surprise, someone near her apartment must have an Internet hookup because he was able to get on. Things must be really slow in Detroit because he is actually reading and commenting on my Blog (dsquared). Of course, I lured him in by saying that I wasn’t sending e-mail but that he could read about my life on my Blog. But what’s more important, he’s discovered WashingtonCube and AlwaysWrite. He read AlwaysWrite’s wonderful poem to his mother – I should say that he let his mother read it on the screen because she is so so deaf – and she loved it, as any Jewish mother would. He sent Cube’s post about the Baltimore Chanukah house to everyone we know. (By the way, I love the fact that you can’t go wrong spelling that Hanukkah word – almost anything goes.) He is slowly but surely getting hooked on Blogging. Now if I can just get him interested in writing. He wrote 3 posts last year and then stopped. But he is a terrific writer and he could match Cube or any of the other greats for special technical effects.

When you sit across the dinner table with the same person for 30 plus years, you can almost run out of things to talk about. This is one of the reasons I started a couples book club 8 years ago. I thought we could discuss the book we were reading from time to time. But the problem is that I usually finish the book early and he is often reading the last 200 pages on the day of the meeting, so there isn’t much to talk about without spoiling the story. Then we went through this awful period of years watching taped episodes of Days of Our Lives – I’m embarrassed to say this now. But we actually did have some fun speculating about how the lame plots of this soap opera were going to go. Thank God we broke this addiction with the help of the Olympics! Currently we often talk about the website that he is masterminding. He is really a technical genius! But I can do little but nod my head in wonder and occasionally suggest a new functionality.

I can see that DC Blogs could fuel many a dinner conversation. I mean, there is virtually a smorgasbord of topics to choose from. There are dating Blogs, political Blogs, funny incident Blogs, and then Blogs about just ordinary people (like me), as well you know. But what is most interesting is that these are real people in the soap operas of real life, not the scripted morons of Salem, USA. I never dreamed that Blogging would provide so many things to talk about!