Interactive Connectivity 9/12/04

No stroll down the street to church or long drive to a country buffet for me today. I'm indulging once again in an electronic journey through cyberspace, reading blogs and dropping in on message boards, following links that make me think. Cross-legged on the bed, with "This Week" providing the dull, nearly-conscious background hum of the tired pseudo-mediated volley between partisan pundits, my head is bursting with interactive connectivity! Breathe! Breathe! There are so many places to go and so much to read. There are so many people! Inside my computer I find the usual, infuriating and often hilarious volleys of email among the weary participants of our Great Big Company fiasco. The Team Leader drives the rest of us crazy, but he initiated the effort, leveraging his relationships. Unfortunately, he's inept and jealously unable to hand over any client interface to any team member whose expertise might apply, so what we're showing the client, the good work that we do, collaboratively, gets distorted as it travels through the kaleidescopic bottleneck that is Leader's inability to write, spell, punctuate, attach a document, open an attached document, or get a joke. It's really gotten tiresome. His ignorance is overshadowed only by his arrogance and he sends these horribly-composed hysterically abusive email tirades to the team, blaming us each in our turn for his mistakes. He actually has endearing moments (it's impossible to take his ridiculous rants too seriously), and he has very loyal old friends in high places. He graduated from a top business school, but we didn't know him before his brain injury, which resulted in a three month coma, causing him some strange and subtle loss of function and impulse control (No, I am *not* making this up!). Only a miracle, or some critically compelling intellectual property, could make this work. George Stephanopoulous is finished and another hurricane is buzzing in the televised background. I should get up and clean but am tempted by the promise of someone to talk with, waiting somewhere online with a story to tell, a question to ask, or a crisis in need of aid, holding on to the notion that they will make me think and write, and that in the course of interacting with them, maybe there waits an "AhHa!" moment of clarity for me, just the tiniest flash of intellectual light that could influence or generate a new idea or a next step. Connectivity brings a kind of relationship grazing that fits nicely into the little moments "in between" and gives me momentary semblences of sane interaction amidst the uncomfortable chaos that is my current circumstance, an electronic life preserver. My home hasn't been this quiet since our oldest was born.