Yesterday Sylvia and her friend Suzanne flew to Victoria for a short getaway. I drove Sylvia to the airport, escorted her inside, wished them well and drove back to Edmonton's north side for an evening of Dungeons & Dragons with my friends.
About as mundane a day as any North American could imagine, and yet thousands and thousands of us are blogging about events equally ordinary. When I came home to an empty house last night, I browsed through some of my older posts and, somewhat embarrassed by the sheer ennui of much of the contents, wondered why I blog at all. Doubtless many folks who have accidentally stumbled upon this blog wonder the same thing.
But after reading forward from the early days of the blog, I realized that I was grateful that I'd captured some of the past few years of my life, however ordinary, because with the passage of enough time, even the everyday somehow starts to feel extraordinary.
Take, for example, Sylvia's flight. Ten or twenty years from now, we might be amazed that middle-class Canadians could afford to travel hundreds or thousands of kilometres for trivial reasons; if the oil runs out and the era of cheap flights ends, what was once mundane could become amazing in retrospect. On the other hand, perhaps by then Canada's capital cities will all be connected by maglev trains that make air travel seem slow, dangerous and inconvenient. Or maybe we'll all be using blimps to get around.
