Preparing for My Sister's Wedding

Everyone? Excuse me everyone! Excuse me.

Thank you. I'd like to propose a toast, to the one thing that truly unites us all. The one thing that is understood by people across all cultures, that brings us together, that, if you'll excuse the cliché, makes the world go 'round. I'm not talking about laughter or music, I'm not even talking about love. One thing transcends all of that, and all of us. No, not God. Good guess though! I'm talking of course about The Internet.

Originally thought only to be a way for 13-year-olds to pose as 20-year-olds and 50-year-olds to pose as 13-year-olds, it has transcended to be so much more. Perhaps those in my generation and older can remember the first time we used the internet. "Wow!" we thought, "I can't believe AOL would give away 10 whole hours for free!" We found instant access to watered-down world news and extraordinarily detailed celebrity gossip. We found message boards where we could post our opinions for all the world to see (as long as they were willing to read through the first 15 pages and find our entry). We found those fantastic chat rooms, where two people were inevitably swaering at each other while the rest of the group tried to respond to points from several lines ago. Ha ha! You know what I'm talking about! We were such slow typists, it was impossible to converse in real time. But we tried anyway. We persevered.

And now look at us, and look at our internet. Thanks to instant messaging our wpm's are skyrocketing. My cousin could type before he could write his own name with a pencil! We can now be in contact with someone five different ways other than walking upstairs to talk to them. Leave them a note on myspace! We can tailor our online community so that we are filtered exactly the type of music, books, news, jokes, and colors that a million other people with similar tastes also liked. I am consistently amazed at how accurate those million people are. And yes, we are becoming dependent on the internet. Yes, "old fashioned" letters and talking and ordering-out for Chinese are slowly going extinct, but we can look up how to make eggs over easy in seconds! We don't even need the opinions of our friends, because the collated opinions of a million people are more accurate. I mean, they're collated by a computer, you know?

Seriously, in all seriousness, it's not just the wine talking. I love the internet. Without Amazon and The Onion and Weather.com, I wouldn't know what to do with myself. So stand aside, mother's milk, the internet nurtures us now, and I think we can all raise our glasses and say we're better off. Join with me now, to the internet!