There are many drawbacks to living in the Age Of The Internet. Among them is the fact that I can no longer have a phone conversation where I sound like a marginally well-functioning human being as opposed to an awkward, stuttering person-bot programmed to focus solely on how quickly the interaction can come to an end (apparently this "condition" is increasingly common nowadays thanks to the fact that emojis let us LOL without actually risking another wrinkle).
So, okay, the fact that people can now communicate without actually seeing each other is potentially problematic, and a bit of a bummer. But it also means that people like me, who live thousands of miles away from many of the people they love the most in the world, get to occasionally feel like those people are a part of their lives in the present moment, not just in occasional "so what have you been up to?!" bursts.
Take Francesca, for example (who lives only about 400 miles away, in Los Angeles, but still: I would very much like to see her every single day, so the example holds). Every once in awhile we get on a back-and-forth text or email marathon about nothing especially important - and it's those kinds of conversations I love the most, because you skip all the "catching up" and just...talk.
