Jul 6
2009

I’m back home in Montreal, visiting for a few days, although really here to gett my wisdom teeth removed and some cavities filled. Thanks Canadian healthcare and McGill student insurance! It should only cost a couple hundred dollars whereas in the states it would have cost several thousand. I decided to wait until the very last minute to figure out how I was getting up here and right before I booked a train ticket that had me leaving DC at 3am (it was about 6pm at the time), I decided to check craigslist rideshare just hoping that by some miracle, I could get a ride to Montreal, or maybe just to NY and then to Montreal… scheming as I usually do last minute to try and save some money on travel. Luckily, there was someone leaving the next morning from DC driving directly to Montreal. The chances are pretty miniscule, but the driver later informed me that I must just be really in tune with the tao at the moment. It’s true, so many amazing opportunities have just been falling into my lap, and this summer and the next year have been and are set up to be some of the most incredible experiences of my life. The driver and I had some amazing conversations, talking the entire drive about life, sharing stories, and truly connecting. We had a lot in common and he was a little older and had a lot of knowledge and experiences to share. It was so refreshing to sit down with someone who I had never met before and just talk for 12 hours about anything and everything. It really gives you a chance to remove yourself from your situation and look at things from an outside perspective, since you are explaining things to someone who has just that. It was definitely a good preparation for leaving for India, and I think we both just had a nice escape from reality while driving through the beautiful valleys of upstate New York. It was also a good exercise for me in making extended converstaion with a complete stranger, which I’m usually not very good at.

Anyway, now I’m back in Montreal, had a great relaxing time last night with Harry, Caitlin, and Cal. I decided not to tell anyone I was coming up and just show up, without a phone and see what happens. So far it’s been really exciting and fun to not have a phone or any plans. As great as all our new social networking tools are for keeping in touch (and I must say it allowed me to get people’s numbers without my phone), theres still some magic to just showing up somewhere, or just dropping by someones house for an impromptu visit. These tools really need to be used as they are, TOOLS. They cannot take the place of communication, and just looking at someones photos and blogs etc. and keeping up with them from a very outsider perspecitve cannot be fulfilling. Many people that I know that feel this way completely shy away from these tools and refuse to use them, but I think that if you use them as a tool to help with communication rather than allowing them to take its place, they can be incredibly useful, allowing more contact and relationships than ever before. If I had shown up here in the same situation 10 years ago, I would have no ones phone number, I don’t know where they had recently moved to, and no way of getting in touch. So I’m rambling, but the point is, technology is amazing but it’s all about how we use. We have to use it to enhance our real interactions with each other and the world rather than allowing it to replace them.

On that note, I will be sharing lots of my experiences through this medium, and since I’m generally pretty bad at keeping in touch with people, I think that this 1-to-many form of communication will really help. It will not only serve to update my friends and family on what’s going on in my life, but it will be the tool that will help foster the 1-to-1 interactions and communication with the people I want to stay in touch with and those who want to stay in touch with me. One could argue that it is much less deliberate and meaningful, because its not people calling each other for an extended conversation, but I’d much rather have an “extended” conversation with many people made of smaller interactions than make long, forced phone calls to a few people.

So friends, please, read this blog. Just skim it, or look at the pictures, or check every once in a while to just see where in the world I may be. Then comment, post links, and send me messages, or just make fun of me for using twitter, so that we may use technology to build our relationships in new and exciting ways that were impossible just a few years ago.