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Bon Journal

Return from offline

One of the first things I did when I returned from my offline holiday was to check my email. The responses to my question have been encouraging. Are my regular readers all men? Or do the female readers not react?

Personally I'm glad to see that the online journal entries provide some value. But equally, this website provides a platform for me to express myself. That's the most important thing.

Offline has been wonderful though. How else can we indulge in human interaction in multi-dimensional space real-time? Or through all five senses? The Internet has a long way to go to bring the offline to the online. But who says we'd want to?

I cycled to the local library to catch up on the news. The newspapers had nothing good to report. In fact, I was quite shocked after two weeks of peaceful and blissful ignorance. Death. Destruction. Fatal train crash in England. Assassination of Dutch politician. Is it better not to know?

Offline, I had more time - time to sleep, time to eat, time to observe, and most of all, time to do nothing.

Yes, I've finally achieved "doing nothing" on a fine cloudless day in southern Spain. The day was too perfect to do anything.

Funnily enough, in the new movie "About a Boy", Hugh Grant plays the bachelor Will who actually does nothing for a living. I met a woman at dinner yesterday who confessed that she, too, did nothing (after working very hard earlier in her life, of course.) I suppose, if the movie becomes successful, "doing nothing" could become quite fashionable.

But now that I'm back online, I'm furiously finding things to do again.

11 May 2002 Saturday