Edubabble and other Blither

When I was a kid, I had a penpal. Her name was Sunni, and she hailed, not surprisingly, from Arizona. I don't know how she and I hooked up, maybe thanks to Weekly Reader or Scholastic Books. We exchanged pictures and a couple of letters, but the chemistry just wasn't there. My dream of becoming lifelong friends who roomed together at college and served as each other's bridesmaids was not to be. We wouldn't marry a pair of Malibu Kens and buy houses next door to each other. I don't have that kind of penpal now, but email is one technology that makes such an idea easier. Professor Girl and I pore over each other's blogs and email back and forth, but our relationship was cemented long before RAM, bitmap, and JPEG. Even without technology, we'd be part of each other's lives.

Last summer I happened upon a discussion board for the Rust Belt Town Times, and soon I had a screen name and new "friends," as it were. Every day I check in on the threads of the forum: Waterfall Park Memories, the Port-a-John Thread, Drug Testing for Teachers, What's the Best Indoor Dog to Get? and many, many more.

It's kind of like a neighborhood bar, really, a neighborhood bar in a very diverse neighborhood. Patrons come from all walks of life (teachers, independent consultants, rocket scientists who really want to be writers, emergency medical personnel, and retired secretaries who know all the secrets of the town); all walks of politics (bleeding heart, head-in-the-clouds, left-wing liberals who hate Bush and the neocons; tight-ass, money-hungry neocons who hate the common man). Out-of-work methadone addicts, stay-at-home moms, brainwashed KKK wannabes, that freaky kid from your 10th grade history class, way-past-their-glory jocks.... you get the picture, I'm sure. All they have in common is a connection to Rust Belt Town, a computer, and opinions.

In the year I've been frequenting this forum, I've often wondered who these people are. Do I know them from my youth? Did I like them in my youth? Did they like me? Did I wait on them at the grocery store? The pizza shop? Are they my friends' parents? Last week, then, I was pleasantly surprised by a post on one of the threads I always check out-- drug testing for teachers. Chrissy, it said, I'll be passing through Dogpatch Tuesday. Want to do lunch? I did.

And so, that's how I ended up meeting Sean-Minersburg, our forum's Papa Smurf, but youthful, beardless, and shirted. He had brought pictures of the thread people, as we call ourselves, from a reunion last October. With the wonder of technology he had superimposed their screen names over their bodies in the group picture. Newman's a lady? I gushed. We discussed the people whose words we read everyday, the people whose words we often disregard as the rantings of imbeciles (those who hold opinions we disagree with), the people whose words we praise (those who hold the right opinions).

Sean and I often don't agree. We're both fairly moderate, politically-- he's more right, and I'm more left-- but have vastly different religious views. He's a Catholic-turned-Baptist while I'm a Fundamentalist Godhead (the only ones actually going to heaven, thank you very much) turned agnostic. Or atheist. He's a successful businessman who feels schools could be run much better by CEOs. I'd like to keep my defined-benefit pension if at all possible. We do have some things in common-- we usually don't tumble into childish namecalling on the threads. We use capital letters and punctuation. His parents live three doors down from my sister. His sister probably went to school with my mother. Differences aside, we had a great lunch.

It's hard to fathom that whole communities of debate exist in which the participants really wouldn't know each other if they ran into each other at the grocery store or the pizza shop, yet they speak everyday. Of course, this isn't a new phenomenon, but it's the first in which I've participated.

Sean has met many of the people in our forum. We've disclosed where we're from (most no longer live in Rust Belt Town), and if he's going to be nearby on business, he asks us out for lunch. He's our elder statesman, our historian, our mediator. Now I have a face to go with the name and the avatar.

I also have lots of penpals. I doubt I'll be moving next door to them-- at least I hope not!

How the hell do I get pictures up here, Professor Girl?? Technology. Grr.