Weddings, Funerals, and the Internet

We have this relative, C., who is the grandson of our grandpa’s sister.  So, his dad and my dad are cousins.  And we see C. only at weddings and funerals, but it’s understood that at said weddings and funerals, he will sit with us and our parents will sit with his and those two places will not be in close proximity to each other.

And we like him just fine.  You look at him and you look at the Butcher and me and you can see that a lot of traits that get blamed on my grandma’s side of the family must really have come from my grandpa’s.  But we only see him every few years at best.  He could be a raging skin-head for all I know.

But along comes the internet and now I go from hearing from C. only at weddings and funerals to hearing from him all the damn time.  And he’s always got some cool idea–Did you see this thing about Led Zeppelin?  If you could be one Lovecraft character, who would it be and how much dispair would you sew in the world?  Etc.

We would ask my Grandma A. to tell us about the good old days and she would look at us like we were crazy.  In her “good old days” she had to empty chamber pots every morning and even though folks were supposed to go out to the outhouse to poop, they often didn’t.  She told us that they’d have to pry her microwave from her cold dead heads.

I sometimes feel that way when I read people grouching about the internet and how much time people spend on computers.  Blah blah blah, maybe everything they say is true, but for me, it’s outweighed by my ability to keep up with people I thought I’d lost track of, and to meet new folks I now hold dear.

I just get so tickled by it all the time I about can’t stand it.