Prattle

INTRANSITIVE VERB: To talk or chatter idly or meaninglessly; babble or prate.

When I was in high school, my friends and I—A and B students all—would spend our class time writing multiple-page notes to each other. Since our lives were really not very exciting (however dramatic we found them at the time), there tended to be a lot of passages in these notes that lamented the slow passage of time til the end of the period. "Well, there are 20 minutes of class left now... Well, there are 15 minutes of class left now..."

For twelve pages.

Not very scintillating stuff, and yet we all loved writing and receiving those notes. We were addicted to the writing—full of doodles and hand-lettered fonts and lots of talk of crawlstrokes (our code word for guys' behinds)—and we thrived on that constant connection to each other.

Nowadays for me, there's blogging. I'm hooked. And sometimes I want to blog so badly that I'm tempted to get online and tell you all how many minutes until my next meeting at work or until the clothes can come out of the dryer.

I'll spare you.

But it's been interesting to watch my daughters develop their own outlets for communication. Through blogging, fanfiction, e-mail, instant messaging, text messaging, and MySpace profiles, bulletins, and photo comments, they stretch their creative wings and savor that same feeling of constant connection to their friends. I am lucky enough to get glimpses of this content now and then, just as my mother probably came across the occasional note left in a pocket, but it's not really for me.

And it's not really about the content (although theirs is pretty damned good). It's about that connection. Anyone who can look at what they produce and see "a waste of time" is missing the point.