The Bubble

A third breast

"You see, I could grow a third breast and I won't get so many comments!"

A fellow blogger contemplating the 350 comments Superhero received for this post.

Me myslef I

She said that she really loves reading blogs because they give her access to places that were once considered closed. To the lives of people who are very distant from her, like this woman from Gaza, for example, who raises a 3 years old child. She found it fascinating, she said, to discover that although her life’s circumstances seemed so different, it basically isn’t, because raising a child is a universal thing, and the problems the woman in Gaza faces are very similar to hers (although she doesn’t have to worry about airplane bombings.) By now she knew many people who blogged, but she had to admit she often finds it hard to tolerate the bloggers’ self-absorbance. “Hadas is a photographer”, she clarified to her friend, “and I like her photographs”.

Ever since that day I find it hard to stop being absorbed with my self-absorbance.

Silence

It is the gaps between the blogger’s entries that interests me the most. It’s the silence that captures my attention, sparkling my imagination.
My friend the pixie said that blogging is a form of performance art. I find myself wondering what she meant.

Eavesdropping

This man stood there for hours, in the rain, many years ago. It was in Amsterdam, and I've always wished I knew why.

I sat at an ice cream parlor yesterday and overheard a chat at the next table:  the vendor of the ice cream place joined an acquaintance, probably a colleague student, who came to visit her. They were in their early twenties. She was telling him about this dream she had about her iPod: how all the songs disappeared from it or something (iPod dreams are very trendy nowadays, so it seems to me). He giggled and told her: “you should read my blog”; “you write a blog”? She asked, “yes”, he replied, and mumbled some stuff that I couldn’t overhear. “I sketch online”, she confessed.

I later thought about him, about this fellow bloger, the only one I met in person so far, and about this amazing blog phenomena; how when people interact there’s always the external interaction; what they say, their mimics and gestures. And then there’s the internal façade, the sub-text: what they think and feel. Both facades, the external and internal don’t necessarily match.  The blog enables one to unveil his subtext: You want to know what I really think: hook up to my blog. Want to know how I feel: all you have to do is type my web-address, click 'enter' and there it is: my soul, naked.

It reminded me of this science fiction book written by Robert Silverberg I’ve read many years ago: “the man in the maze”. The book tells the story of an outcast: due to intervention on the part of aliens the protagonist ends up emanating an aura of all of his thoughts and feelings, which proves too poisonous for others to tolerate. The psychic revulsion he elicits in others is not the result of a particularly warped psyche; rather it is the natural condition of being human. Ironically, the (anti)hero is, from a certain perspective, more human than everyone else, because he cannot hide his humanity. His “disease” forces him to withdraw from his fellow humans’ company. He becomes an exile.

So, instead of infesting one another with our feelings and emotions, we type them into our computer and send them out there, to the vast landscape of the Internet. All of us become a bit like the angels in “Wings of Desire”, being able to hear our fellow humans' hidden thoughts. We log on and feel the pulse of humanity. We don’t need to be exiles; we can be blogers.

Meta bloging

Meta bloging and minor obsessions:

1. Checking my Stats: ever since Google found me (a shocking experience at first). I developed this obsession of checking my blog's statistics. I can see the referring address to my site. If I click on the Google search, I can locate the search origin. People who reached my site through Google, for example, were searching for:

The bubble girl – bath
Yom Kippur
Buzz light-Year - wingspan

It fascinates me. I imagine the globe from a bird's eye; it's enormous. So many countries, so many people, so many houses, so many apartments, so many doors, windows, walls, rooms, toilettes, kitchens, TV. sets, computers .  Inside one of these rooms sits a person who writes a few words in his computer, and finds me.

2. Another thing I've become obsessed with, and this is a bit embarrassing to admit, is the comments issue; people don't comment. The comments being opened is the software default. So I leave it open. But than no-one writes anything and it says: comments: 0. I do understand. I can definitely relate: I never left a comment in a blog. I mean, what can you say? But still, other blogs have comments in them. I saw with my very own eyes.  And counted them too. Maybe I should just cancel the damn thing.   

3. I spend hours on the net trying to figure out how to find an apartment in Toronto.
So if any of you lonesome riders girl-in –bubble Yiddishkite seekers Buzz light-Year fans accidentally come across my corner and know anything about apartment hunting in Toronto, please let me know.