Thoughts from the Veranda – More Perspectives

If you haven’t noticed, my thoughts from the veranda almost always coincide with Camillo’s travel. When he is gone my schedule (HIS schedule of meals / conversation / drinks / naps / bedtime that I work around) dissolves and I become disoriented, lost and introspective. Today it is raining again so I am not actually on the veranda but metaphorically, I am thinking and contemplating life from the veranda.

 

Yesterday, I read a blog The Butler and Bagman Chronicles and something Mark (B&B) said has taken me more than 24 hours to digest and to question if this is how I feel and if not should I. He is talking about blogging and how he needs to take time away from the blog world, he says that it is "... Difficult, sometimes, to remember that there is a real world that I live in". The real world, what is a real world, who’s real world?

 

I am in my office, in our home situated on a high hill north of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – this is real. At a distance there are dogs and roosters marking their (real) world with the sound of their voices. Outside there is sound of rain, an occasional motorcycle on the road below, birds singing as they finish their ‘real’ day.  Inside my house it is silent; the only sounds are the hum of the computer and the tap of my fingers on the keyboard. If I stop writing for a minute, I can hear my heart beating in my ears it is so silent. (and I have a cold so my ears are stopped up) This is my ‘real’ world. If I type out a recipe, an observation, enter a photo or I tell a story about my ‘real’ world and I send it out into cyberspace as a blog does it become imaginary? Not of the real world.

 

I spend maybe 2 hours a day either writing or reading blogs (okay lets be fair - 3 hours, on a rainy day maybe 4). I read about 'real' life in Georgia, Maryland, New Jersey, Canada, India, other cities in Brazil and sometimes I just browse to see what is out there. There are stories about families, and dogs and the meals that have been cooked, restaurants that have been enjoyed, their ‘real’ worlds. I enjoy poetry and photography from these many different ‘real’ worlds. I often leave comments when moved by corresponding ideas and have a feeling of being a part of a very large, wide, rich ‘real’ world. This could be living vicariously (experienced through somebody else rather than at first hand, by using sympathy or the power of the imagination) but what is being a couch potato? Watching 10 hours of baseball, soccer, football, the Olympics, old Arnold Schwarzenegger movies on TV every weekend, is this living in the ‘real’ world?

 

Sad but true, blogging has taken me off the mountain top, expanded my world, added people – real people not characters from a book – to my day that I can talk with (in English), exchange ideas, keep (no matter how remote) contact with. It has added people to care about. From my perspective, sitting here in this isolated place above the forest, the world of blogs is a real world. Should this be true? Maybe another day on the veranda would answer that. Should I take warning that my life is now out in cyberspace, for now no. As long as I have family, have a husband, spend 2 hours at the gym speaking Portuguese, have interest in learning new things (mostly recipes), as long as this blogging thing is a hobby like any other hobby then it is a good thing and not to worry.