Next blog

Last night my world got bigger. I never understood why so many of the blogs I read had a "next blog" link at the top. When I clicked I was amazed. Suddenly I was looking into the minds of many many kinds of people. I was fascinated by teenagers, fashion designers, scientists . . . even people who blogged about a million different things at once. My understanding of life expanded. I felt more connected than ever.

But it gets even better. Fortunately, the "next blogs" come from all over the world. Some of them looked so interesting I found myself trying to read the texts, grabbing on to any word I knew . . . or even just the sentence structures and punctuation. Suddenly I had a 2:00 in the morning idea. Google translate. It takes some time figuring it out (I have only scratched the surface,) but I was fairly immediately reading blogs from many different countries and cultures. Blogs about the most ordinary things were interesting to me. The imperfect translations made me feel like I was talking directly with the authors, hearing their accents and gaining a whole new perception of what a language's sentence structure means.

I found out that with a simple cut and paste I could make my blog available to people who spoke any language on Google translate's long list of available translation combinations. Now, I don't imagine that anyone in Israel or anywhere else in the world is particularly interested enough to read about my cat or my bookshelf or my photoshopped dogs. However, it is true that at times last night I found myself wishing that the woman who wrote about lipstick (which I never wear) had opted to make her blog available for translation.

In my wildest dreams I never imagined the possibility of being so connected to the rest of the world. I hope someday lifeboat will end up as somebody's "next blog," expanding their world as they read and shake their head about everyday, ordinary thoughts of "some American woman."