The conversation

This picture was sent to me by my husband and I couldn't resist sharing it with you. It's entitled "The Conversation," which he discovered on Reddit, a very interesting website that gives people the opportunity to share all kinds of information with others who might be interested. This picture is at first startling, then you realize these two creatures are obviously separated by a pane of glass, but they are definitely communing. I wonder what is going on in those heads?

Which leads me to a question I have for you, my dear readers. You can answer, or not, but I realize that one of the reasons I write is to be able to find out what I think. Judith Warner has written a column for the New York Times for years, called "Domestic Disturbances." She wrote her final column this week, and here's a (to me) relevant quote from it:

Often, writing here, I didn’t know fully what I felt — about things going on in my own life — until I read what I’d written. And very often I didn’t understand what I’d written until I heard it coming back at me.

Well said, Judith. I think this is what blogging is all about for me. I'm trying to understand why I am writing here, why we all are writing here. I think it's important to ask this question now and then, and sometimes I am surprised by the comments you make. We all have such different lives, and I enjoy the variety so much. You often give me a template to understand decisions I've made in a different light.

The conversation we share is personal, within limits, because we are all out there hanging out in cyberspace where anybody can read what we write. I censor myself sometimes and try to keep controversy to a minimum. You don't know my politics, my religion, whether I have ever done anything illegal, or even if I've gone skinny dipping. It's because I am afraid of offense, or worse yet, having it come back to me as it did to Andrew Feldmar in 2007. He is a Canadian psychotherapist who is barred from ever entering the United States again because he used LSD in 1967 (when it was legal). The border guard googled him and a paper he had written came up.

He has been married to Meredith Feldmar, an artist,  for 37 years, and they live in Vancouver's Kitsilano neighbourhood. They have two children, Soma, 33, who lives in Denver, and Marcel, 36, a resident of L.A. Highly respected in his field, Feldmar has been travelling to the U.S. for work and to see his family five or six times a year.

Not any more. Here's a link to a fascinating Alternet article that tells the whole story. He tried everything to regain the ability to come into the United States again with no luck. If you have ever admitted to any drug use, and they find out because you wrote about it, well, too bad. So I try hard not to write about anything offensive or remotely controversial.

I know that if the border guard were to google my name, this website would come up, along with several others from the time I was on the Board of Directors of the United States Parachute Association. It's really sad that we here in the United States cannot hold conversations even in our emails that are totally and completely private. I guess we can thank the Department of Homeland Security for that.

Now before I go off on a rant, I just wanted to say this to you: I cherish your comments and am really happy that our conversations are as open and honest as they are. My readers give me a sense of community that would be otherwise lacking in my life. I love to read about your exploits and strive to make my posts interesting. My question: given the parameters laid out, what can I tell you about me that you don't know and want to know? I sometimes wonder that about you, as I try to glean the person behind your own blog posts. Who are you really?
:-)