I wasn't blogging because I was too busy wasting time on the internet, OK?

The past couple of days have been pretty quiet around here, and it isn't because I didn't have access to the internet. (Well, OK, on Sunday I was either going to church, in church, or coming home from church for an eleven hour stretch, so I couldn't post, but don't worry, internet, because I was praying for you--in particular that you would see fit, in your infinite mercy, to leave me lots of comments.)

Wow, that was a long digression. I'll start again.

Hello, internet, and welcome to a side of Poppy you haven't seen before: the side that gets totally sucked into internet user group dramas.

A friend of mine owns a Yahoo group, and things got ugly for a few days there, and I was pretty much glued to my laptop for hours at a time keeping up with things and weighing in from time to time with what I hoped was sage advice.

Because, you know, been there/done that.

You know, sometimes I think people get fooled by the slick hardware and software they're using. You know, here I am with a completely beautiful 17-inch laptop, running all kinds of excellent software, able to check the weather, listen to music, IM my pals, look at people's pictures, blog, email, update a spreadsheet, and write the long-overdue letter to my mother (who lives in a cave, eats mastodon for dinner, and expects me to write her letters--and no, a phone call won't do. )

Surrounded, as I said, with all this slick software and hardware, which, when it works, works amazingly well, it's easy to forget that the people on the other side of the screen are human beings. Who are imperfect. Maybe they have morning breath, maybe they're catching a cold, and maybe they don't read with the kind of attention our elegant, eloquent writing deserves.

And yet, we keep writing.

Now that I have your attention, let me take you away from the internet and bring you to church with me. I'd like you to meet the choir, which is mostly made of professional musicians. I've learned a lot from them, and in turn, I have taught them to be patient with well-meaning amateurs like me.

So anyway, this is one thing I've learned from the pros: in a studio, an artist like Barbra Streisand will record 16 versions of the same song and polish and perfect until it's just right. But in real life, when you perform for a living, you do the best you can, and then you move on. When a performance is over, you don't perform endless post-mortems on it; you get ready for the next gig. You get better not by working on a single song and making it perfect, but by performing lots of music many times. In front of a live audience. Which may or may not appreciate your talent.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that even in a written medium with a long, long archival memory, this too will pass. The moving finger writes, and having written, forgets what the hell it was saying.

And now, excuse me. I need to go check my email. Maybe something else has happened.