All my life I have been good at communicating. I wrote snail mail letters, longhand, by the dozen, back in the day when that was what was available to be written. As soon as I understood about e-mail, blogging, and MSN, I signed on. Now, I have discovered FaceBook. I know that if I were to get into the cell phone generation, I could text away to my heart's content.

Certainly, there is a certain pleasure in saying "hi" to people after a few years via a "poke" or a greeting. It's good to know that one former student is a Harvard graduate, and another is playing Scrabble with yet two more young Belizean friends. It's fun. It's also good to be able to leave the "Ms" Heather image or persona which never felt comfortable anyway. I was "just Heather" for a decade. Now I am getting accustomed to "Professor Cardin", although I told the students that I prefer to be addressed as Heather. Some do, some don't. My point is that I like being "in touch."

I must observe, however, that although we have many ways of communicating, we still seem to have very little of substance to communicate about. I don't say this judgmentally, or sadly...just with interest that all this poking and messaging and MSN stuff goes on, much of it completely public and available to anyone who wants to tune in (thanks to Chris for the glimpse of Salma's lovely breasts)...and most of the messages seem to have gone from "Hi, how are you, I am fine" to "Hey, whassup, check this out dude." Or the next generational blather.

I generalize, I know. Yet I remember, back in the day when computers started getting personal, we thought it would save the trees. Less paper. Books online. A brave new world of instant communication, along with instant cereal, the nutritional equivalent of theatre makeup. Lest I rant, I will pose the simple question: With all these means of communication, what are we actually saying? And the corollary: is anybody listening?

Have a good (great, awesome, cool) day. Communicate this.