**Remember when we used to talk to people?

**Ghost Blogging time! We think this is a great message, especially this time of year. Please lend our ghost writer, and her blog, your thoughts!** Sazaran and Nomz

With cell phones and computers and computers inside our cell phones we have incredible, instant access to information and to people. This is perfect for a girl like me; impatient and preferring not to hold a phone for too long, I can shoot a text or e-mail out for the response I need from a friend. Via social networking, we can get to know strangers and exchange tidbits with old friends that we’d otherwise lose touch with. I love browsing through the people I’m connected to and taking a look through their virtual photo album to see what they’ve done, where they’ve gone, how they’ve grown and leaving rambling messages on how cute their new babies are. There are more benefits to modern technology than I care to list and a number of them are taken for granted as we adjust to having them so readily available that we forget what it was like without them.

Remember when we used to talk to people?

Conversations with friends and family are rife with typos and emoticons and abbreviations. What happened to the smiles that don’t involve keyboards and shift keys and the exclamations marked by the excitement in our voice and not the symbol that says it for us? In a world where actions speak louder than words, why are we allowing ourselves to go mute? The world is falling silent around us and the only noise is the click-click-click of thumbs on a keypad.

It’s time to lift your eyes and open your mouth. We can’t accept sincerity through our inboxes. We have to communicate with our bodies and our voices, with touch and expression before talking at all is ancient dialect.

Jill Hausen | www.calamityjill.com