parker’s desk

I am pretty sure that Heather and I set some kind of record the other night for longest video chat ses­sion ever — five hours, nine min­utes.  The record break­ing is really more lucky break­ing maybe “aver­age length nor­mal peo­ple video chat” or some­thing like that, but that doesn’t sound as epic as it felt to us.

It is just absolutely amaz­ing the kind of effect that par­tic­u­lar piece of tech­nol­ogy had on us.  I mean, sure…a lot has changed since the kind of long dis­tance rela­tion­ship I knew — email is con­ve­nient and easy to access, there’s text mes­sag­ing now, mobile min­utes aren’t really a worry, easy to send pics and even videos you’ve recorded or made. 

Noth­ing com­pares to video chat though. heh.

When I started hav­ing a pretty strong feel­ing I was going to be going for the long run with Heather, I remem­ber ask­ing my friend Kate for some advice as to what she had done to help main­tain the long dis­tance rela­tion­ships she had been in…she had been in one I could specif­i­cally remem­ber her talk­ing about and I trusted her feed­back.  The biggest take away was video chat, which I’d only done once pro­fes­sion­ally and a cou­ple of times with my kids for my Mom back in Wis­con­sin.  It’s funny, it makes sense log­i­cally but I really had no clue the impact it could actu­ally have.

So I’d brought that up casu­ally to Heather, and she’d said at the time that she liked the good ol’ fash­ioned way of talk­ing.  I didn’t really pay it much more mind than that, I think I fig­ured that her lap­top didn’t have a web­cam on it (which it didn’t) and it’d end up being a huge has­sle for her.  Mind you I didn’t know what it was going to be like, I think if I had then I would have been like “what, you’re craaaaazy” and setup a web­cam for her when I came and visited.

Flash for­ward to last week, she got to see video chat in action between her daugh­ter & her daughter’s boyfriend on an iPad, and was sold right away.  I got really excited about the idea of get­ting to see her, but I think I was still pic­tur­ing the ancient video chat of super-tiny images of hor­ri­ble qual­ity doing more of a strobe-light thing of still images than actual voice & video per­fectly sync’d up.  So on Sat­ur­day evening her daugh­ter was home and she let Heather bor­row her iPad, we hooked every­thing up over Skype and set a time to chat.

It was hilar­i­ous the kind of effect this ended up hav­ing on me.  I felt like I was going on a date all the sud­den!  I wanted to change clothes, brush my teeth and put on some cologne, it was ridicu­lous but fun.  Put a shirt on I liked, kinda prepped the lights in my room so I was record­ing a decent pic­ture and patiently awaited our time.  Text mes­sage later and it was on.

It really was like a date…huge grins, sore cheeks, her beau­ti­ful every­thing mak­ing me stum­ble on my words and some­times just stop and hap­pily sigh.  I got to see all her funny lit­tle man­ner­isms, her bit­ing her lip (melt) and crin­kling her nose.  When we’re on the phone it’s hours (like I said, aver­age of 3 hours) of solid-packed con­ver­sa­tion, but when we’re together in per­son it’s a mix of talk­ing and just qui­etly appre­ci­at­ing one another’s pres­ence.  This was a sort of beau­ti­ful taste of that, minus the option to reach out and touch her face or play with her hair.

Beg­gars can’t be choosers!

I guess it’s not all that much of a sur­prise that 5 hours passed by us so quickly.  It was actu­ally really hard to say good­night and sign off for the evening, nei­ther one of us wanted to say good­night and we delayed it sev­eral times before finally know­ing it was time to get some­thing related to sleep.  Even­tu­ally we did though, and the rest of the evening was a good deal more sad than it had been before.  How­ever, I woke the next morn­ing feel­ing like I had been able to just hang out with my lady all evening the night before and that really left me on cloud nine for the rest of the day.

In some ways I’m really jeal­ous that this kind of tech­nol­ogy wasn’t around for me 10+ years ago, but in other ways I kinda like that this is a first-time expe­ri­ence for the both of us.  The more things I get to do for the first time ever with her, the bet­ter.  No repeats.

Still…damn kids out there have it easy these days. 

G’night.

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