The blue wire trellising with the curves is wire clothes line, something you don't see a lot of in urban hardware stores or actually strung up in many suburbs. Hanging clothes on the line, face it, is not an efficient use of our time these days. I know there is a lot of nostalgia regarding the line-fresh smell of clothes dried outdoors on the clothesline. I know there is a lot of talk of sustainability and such. But really, how many of us actually dry the bulk of our clothes out on the clothesline?
When I first made this porch-sized dream catcher, the roses, William Baffin, themselves were a dream. Now I predict a fairly good show starting mid-June or so, looking something like this.
Before the roses, and coming soon a clematis 'Alionushka' I planted there this last summer, the dream catcher itself was the feature. It is covered with 1"-square mirror tiles, pretty crystals, and bright beads. It has sort of a nature effect as some of the beads, micro-filament fishing line, and tiny mirrors mimic spider webs, caterpillars, and insects of all types. It is a tiny virtual world.
This week, I caught an episode of one of my favorite shows, Criminal Minds. It was the last in a series in an arc where the boy super-genius, Dr. Reed, has been carrying on an affair with a woman he has never met. In this episode, she dies. (Does this sound familiar?) He admits to himself (and Morgan)that although he has not met her or told her, he loves her. It doesn't matter what she looks like. His relationship has been on line, phone call from pay phones (a different one each time). He has this relationship. It is important to him. We, the viewers, must acknowledge it as real.
How much different is this from posting a entry to my blog. It is like tucking a letter into a bottle and tossing it into the internet sea. This week I used a couple day posts to host a virtual garden walk. YouTube! What a resource!
I watch my Handsome Son text his girlfriend when we eat or are traveling somewhere. It is like there are three of us, not two, everywhere we go. Sometimes there are a whole group of us, friends of his, his dad, the girlfriend, all right there, giving their opinions on everything we share with them.
I get up and check Facebook to see what people are up to, what silly meme has been posted, and even who has posted a new blog entry on the sidebar of the gardeners and artists whose lives and efforts I follow in a most tangential way.
How different is all this activity from Manti Te'o's' troubles?
On my blog, my roses can be in bloom. In the real world, it is not 20 degrees and it is freezing. On YouTube, I can visit almost anywhere in the world. At school there is a young mildly autistic boy who during free time uses the Google Earth app to hunt for bigfoot and the Lockness Monster.
This last really had me going.
I asked him to check out what my son was doing. I told him he's at college at UW-Green Bay. In a matter of seconds he was using GoogleEarth to walk the campus sidewalks and had actually found his dorm. This is a boy, who I probably wouldn't let attempt to walk across town.
Social media will continue to blur the lines in our world between virtual and real. I think everyone should give Te'o' a break on this one. Unless someone comes forward and admits to hoaxing him, we may never really get a clear idea what is really going on with this.
Really? Really!
