Communication Media

My parents called me yesterday, and one of the first things my mother asked me was if I had purchased more towels, a clear reference to The War of the Towels (which, in case none of you picked up on it, was named after The War of the Roses that to this day represents the most accurate portrayal of marital bliss ever captured on film, except maybe 4 or 5 of the seasons of Married with Children). Now it is somewhat unusual that my mother makes reference to one of my blog posts because, quite simply, she doesn't read the blog. Nor does my father.

But then it struck me - my parents had just returned from a visit with my sister and her husband, and my sister is the one and only person from my fambly who reads my blog. Yes, despite near universal acceptance of the blog by The Mrs.'s fambly, I have but one regular reader from my fambly. And she's a bit of a lurker, having not left a comment in over a year. Now, I do have a strangely large number of hits from the Boston area to the blog, so I like to pretend that perhaps my niece also reads it, but it could just as easily be one of my co-workers from out that way since our sister site is outside of Boston. Brothers/nephews/cousins I have no evidence of.

The interesting thing is that I always know when my parents have talked to my sister, because they mention all kinds of stuff from the blog. My dad will spend 2-3 hours a day on the computer, but he will wait for my sister to fill him in on what is happening on the blog.

My favorite is when I get a call out-of-cycle (my parents call me only on Sundays, as it is my job to call every weekend, and if I haven't called by Sunday afternoon, I get a call to see if we're still alive), and my mother asks very hushedly, "Is everything alright? I heard you were fighting with [The Mrs.]." Well, my goodness but it's hard to figure out which blog post that might be referring to on any given day.

So, I'd just like to say this for the record - If The Mrs. and I are actually, really, honest-to-god fighting, you aren't going to see a blog post about it. What you get to see is the absurdities that two people who have been together for so long (23 years as of January this year) have little quarrels about when they are both tired and both have trying jobs and (very) annoying Childrens. This is, after all, primarily a humor blog.

And, really, the towel thing was more about humor than about domestic strife. She does too much laundry? I'm pretty sure that doesn't rise to the "I'll give you half my stuff if you go away" level. But it does drive me f'ing insane.

And insanity makes good blog posts (I'd insert a link to Blogauthor's blog now, but she's gone underground and not only is the blog private, but I don't even have a link due to my penchant for using netvibes as an RSS reader. It looks like Google Reader is able to handle private blogs, but I haven't figured out how to use it yet (having spent a grand total of 16 seconds looking at it)).

So, I find it humorous that most of what my parents know is going on in my life they have gotten via talking to my sister, who has gotten the information from reading this blog. (They don't seem to know much about the weather here, so I'm guessing my sister doesn't read my weather blog.) Now the really odd thing is that I actually talk to my parents every week, and I very close to never actually talk to my sister, and yet most of what they know about me they get from her. I really suck at keeping up with the siblings, and I'm not sure I even have her phone number (I have 3 numbers with 3 different area codes - 315, 585, 239 - and I do know that they don't live anywhere near 315 anymore).

Of course, I can't complain too much because my sister invited me to her Facebook thingee, but I am too much of a luddite to figure out Facebook. And thus, the proliferation of communication media serves not to bring us closer, but instead serves to separate us into provincial little groups of ATT vs. Verizon free mobile-to-mobile, myfamily.com vs. email, and blogs vs. Facebooks.

But at least I can sell advertising space on my blog. Hah. Beat that.