sonofa.
On a completely unrelated note--thank goodness I'm getting off of the previous topic because the hairs on the back of my neck are itching--okay--calmness--okay--so, on a completely unrelated note, Gary call-from-his-car Turner is doing some spectacular thinking and writing over on his lapses blog.
I don't know if Gary absorbed some of Halley's undeniable positive energy while she was over there, in which case he would now qualify as "mental" (as he lovingly calls Halley), or whether Halley slipped something into Gary's milk when he was changing Cameron--either way, he's positively glowing. Check him out.
Gary writes in one post about just what bloggers are doing meeting and greeting and loving one another in the physical world as we back circuit this blogging pastime into real-world personal relationships that--in many of our cases--are stronger than most real-world friendships that came before them.
That's entirely the rub.
Gary discusses so eloquently his 'take-away' from his family's time with Halley, who, on her own dime and of free will, flew across the ocean meet her fellow bloggers-become-friends. Halley's met more bloggers than anyone I know. She's like the Julie McCoy of Blogaria, for crying out loud. And it's simply beautiful.
The first day Halley called me--it's been almost a year ago now--she blasted me off my couch and through the roof with her energy--energy I would never, ever, have come across if not for blogging. Because Halley and I, and Chris and I, and Elaine and I, and Marek and I, and Tom and I, and Shelley and I, and Gary and I--we were all strangers a year-and-a-half ago. And now, we don't just write here--we talk out there, in actual brick-and-mortarville, on the phone, through packages. We're not pen pals. We're really in one another's lives.
And in Halley's case, she's actually touching human flesh--she's written friends into real, tangible, physical existence. And it's been an incredible joy to watch her do it.
Gary says it better than I:
"Self-elected representatives of strangers the world over, they sought each other out. Driven only by the instinct to reduce the number of strangers on the planet by a small number, the strangers threw themselves at the scenery of life and stepped out of their stranger free comfort zones. The strangers became friends to one another proving, if nothing else, that they were alive at that same precise moment, that they were steering their own ships, ships which this one time chose not to pass in the night and that, above all, they proved that there exists a unique aspect shared equally between all humans who just need to make the effort to discover it. The fact that we are."
How beautiful is that?
Happy valentine's day.
