Fifteen years ago I would fire up the old computer with excitement.  I remember clicking on the Netscape icon in order to access the “world-wide web”.  After about thirty seconds, the sound of a phone dialing would ring out of the computer followed by about sixty-three minutes of “beeeeeeeeeee boooooooo schkwaaaaaaaaaaaaa firrrrrrrrrrrl ztttt ztttt beeeeeeee”… and then lo and behold, I’m finally opening my one email. 

This was an amazing time.  What a revolution!!! 

Now, as I sit at my Mac Powerbook and click on Firefox, I’m good to go at the speed of light… relatively speaking.  I believe that all of this instant gratification is actually diminishing our patience.  For example; I click on a web-site and it’s taking approximately eight seconds to load.  I sigh, roll my eyes and shout “awwwww, for fuck sakes, what’s wrong with this stupid world?  I don’t have time for this shit!”  and then I click off that site to go to another.  What’s up with that?

So in order to remedy this, I have resolved to breath deeply as I sit at the computer and take the time to appreciate where we’ve come in such a short period of history. 

The amount of information that we now have access to is staggering.  For thousands of years we trudged along making incremental progress and then from 1900 to 1950 we doubled that progress.  Every ten years since, the amount of information continues to expand at an exponential rate.  I cannot wait to see what will happen in the next fifty years.  Life is amazing. 

So that is part of what I contemplate while waiting for slow web-sites to load or if my computer has to take a moment to process its emotions.  That, and how “googling” myself meant something totally different when I was twelve.