Keeping connected

Today is only the eleventh day of mandatory "stay at home" regulations in Washington state, and already folks are going stir-crazy.  Compliant, in general, but stir-crazy.

However asocial and reclusive we may think ourselves to be, we don't realize how much each of us craves a certain amount of social contact.  "Stay at home" means that you socialize in person only with those persons already in your household.  For single people, like me, it means you socialize with no one.  (Yes, you can say hi to neighbors you walk past outdoors while walking -- but only from six feet away.)

As I've mentioned in past posts --and should be apparent from much that you read in this blog -- in general, I'm quite happy being solitary for days on end.

How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.
--Virginia Woolf

Ok, we don't all feel that way.  But some of us might.

But even the most solitary, unless our desire for isolation is pathological, have valued ties of friendship and family that they take for granted.  Sociability that may be unconscious, but that is badly missed when it is absent.

As in these days of quarantine and "stay at home."

But technology has provided an imperfect means to stay in touch -- far from perfect, far from ideal, but better than emails, better than phone calls.  Not necessarily better than old fashioned letters, but of a different, more immediate sort.  I refer to audio-visual communications like Skype and Zoom. 

I'd never used Skype, although some members of my family have.  But I understood the concept.  I didn't realize that these tools could also be used -- in fact are in some ways designed to be used -- for teleconferences among groups of individuals, as in business meetings, not just for one-on-one conversations.

I had a "major" birthday yesterday.  I felt doomed to mull over its significance alone.  But my niece introduced me, and others in the family, to teleconferencing on Zoom.  We had a tentative conference on Saturday, just to see how it works, and then a formal birthday conference between me, my brother and his wife, my sister, and my niece yesterday.

I realize I get excited over developments with which most of my readers have been long familiar (cf. my post a couple of years ago about the amazing Starbucks app), but, hey, better late than never.  Zoom posed some problems getting everyone on line, but once there it works great.  The images aren't quite as clear and crisp as in the photo above, but certainly good enough. 

We tended to talk over each other on-line, but then we also tend to talk over each other when we're talking together in person.  It was fun, it was almost like being in the same room, and it was a more immediate experience than talking on a telephone conference call.

And when you've had enough (solitude lover that you are), you don't have to endure long farewells.  You just press the "off" button!