Blogs and Blackberries

The first time I heard about a blog was about two years ago. It was 6:25 a.m., and I was on the 31 bus going across town to work. The nice thing about taking public transportation at the same time and place every day is that you can meet people. My new friend on the 31 was a man in his late 50's who worked for the government in the workers' compensation department. Our daily conversations varied from family life to how it should be required to have a license to push a shopping cart around our local supermarket. Sometimes we spoke for five minutes or less, sometimes for the entire hour of our bus journey.

One morning, he hopped onto the bus with a folded newspaper in hand. The expression on his face showed he was ready to talk and that he had been preparing for our morning discussion. "You're American so you have obviously heard of blog," he said, putting emphasis on the 'o' in the word 'blog', making it rhyme with 'vogue'. Long 'o' or short 'o', I couldn't make out what on earth he was talking about. "How is it spelled?" I asked. He then unfolded the newspaper and put it on my lap. There it was, a picture of a man in a business suit in front of a computer "blogging". I don't think it would have been much easier to understand if the newspaper had been in English...I just couldn't get it. Everybody in America was blogging according to the article. I felt that, as an American citizen abroad, I had been left out of some sort of national secret. When I got home from work that afternoon, I called my sister. Honestly, I wasn't sure if 'blog' rhymed with 'dog' or 'vogue' so I pronounced it both ways under my breath. She went on to tell me that my cousins and a good majority of our mutual friends had blogs, and I was feeling more left out than ever.

Take another example, the Blackberry. To me, 'blackberry' was just a fruit until I began watching satellite TV where all of these American stars talked about their "Blackberries". I understood that it wasn't the same blackberry that I was thinking of but some sort of expensive electrical device that seemingly does everything. I then found out that Blackberries aren't only reserved for the famous people, but I, too, knew relatively normal people with Blackberries.

When I went back to the States just a few months ago, I was talking to my friend trying to arrange a time and place to meet up. We were exchanging cell phone numbers, and she told me to tell her my phone number again because she couldn't read her "chicken scratch". For several brief moments, I forgot the idiomatic expression about bad handwriting and thought that some new device similar to the Blackberry called "Chicken Scratch" had been created (Note: if anyone reading this decides to create such a device by that name, please kindly remember the person who gave you the idea).

You may be reading this and thinking that I am very dumb. I am the first to admit that I am NOT Einstein, but, to my credit, the technological world is rapidly expanding, not giving me much time to catch up on my knowledge. In addition, I live in a town where shops close 3 hours for lunch and where there is still a majority of an entire generation of people who have never eaten in a McDonalds. Granted, children here tote around their Gameboys, too, and computers are a part of the daily lives of many, but as for all of the little extras, they are a little slower at making it across the Atlantic. And although I sometimes feel a little bit out of loop of my fellow countrymen, sometimes not knowing about certain things makes our lives a little less complicated...and to me that can be a good thing.