A new study finds that blogging–particularly the personal, day-in-the-life variety, can lead to a greater sense of belonging and connectedness with the rest of the world. Here’s a good summary of the study’s findings:

The researchers found support for deeper self-disclosure from bloggers resulting in a range of better social connections. These included things such as a sense of greater social integration, which is how connected we feel to society and our own community of friends and others; an increase in social bonding (our tightly knit, intimate relationships); and social bridging — increasing our connectedness with people who might be from outside of our typical social network.

I’m always gauging the level of intimacy I offer readers. When I first started doing this, I probably wrote things that would now strike me as too revelatory or narcissistic. But I do think that this blog has played an important role in my own happiness over the last several years. Like just about everyone else on this planet, I’m prone to moments of isolation and loneliness. The comments and e-mails that this blog elicits are a wonderful anodyne for those feelings.

I sometimes think how my life would have been different if I had never started this blog. The friendships that would have remained acquaintances. The blog has served as a kind of springboard or facilitator for many lasting connections. I try to remember that on those days when I’m staring at a blank screen, trying to think of something, anything, to say.

You know that Facebook meme that’s going around? The one where you’re supposed to write 25 things about yourself? Well, here are 10 things about me that are not in the least bit true or accurate.

1. I was born in one-room shack in the Yukon backwoods to anarchist parents who are still wanted by Interpol.
2. The color magenta makes me violently ill.
3. I make a tidy living writing explicit romance novels under the pseudonym Lady Desiree Wanton St. James.
4. David Bowie has my e-mail address and he keeps forwarding me LOLcats pictures. 
5. My disability is the result of an accidental exposure to gamma radiation on military proving grounds in the New Mexican desert.
6. On three separate occasions, I’ve been abducted by aliens. The first two incidents were, on the whole, rather pleasant. The third, not so much.
7. I can’t fall asleep without the soundtrack for Footloose playing in the background.
8. I had a secret affair with a Cirque du Soleil performer.
9. I have a recurring dream in which Abraham Lincoln, Jerry Seinfeld, and I are doing improv comedy in front of a live audience.
10. The Russian Mafia has a contract out on me.

To pick up yesterday’s travel theme, the local press is speculating that some of the stimulus money might be used to start work on a high-speed train corridor between the Twin Cities and Chicago. Although it probably won’t be completed until I’m pushing 50, I like the idea of being able to hop on a train and arrive a few hours later in the third-largest city in America. And unlike air travel, I won’t have to get out of my chair and I won’t have to put up with getting frisked by some overeager TSA agent who also wants to swab my ventilator for explosive residue. They might even build a branch to Green Bay, which could spare my parents from making the long, boring drive to visit me and my sister (although I’m probably overdue for a trip back to the Land of Cheeseheads).

Here’s a choice passage from yesterday’s Times article about twentysomethings trying to get by in the Big Apple without health insurance.

“My first reaction was to start laughing — I just kept saying, ‘No way, no way,’ ” Alanna Boyd, a 28-year-old receptionist, recalled of the $17,398 — including $13 for the use of a television — that she was charged after spending 46 hours in October at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan with diverticulitis, a digestive illness. “I could have gone to a major university for a year. Instead, I went to the hospital for two days.”

The article goes on to describe how the hip and uninsured are resorting to diagnoses via the Internet and treating themselves with expired medications. New York’s governor is proposing a change in law that would allow young adults to remain on their parents’ insurance policies until age 29, but that won’t be of much help to the vast majority of the state’s uninsured young adults. Most of them also make too much money to qualify for Medicaid, even if they work a minimum-wage job.

As Dr. Atul Gawande pointed out in his terrific article on health care reform in The New Yorker, “In every industrialized nation, the movement to reform health care has begun with stories about cruelty.” The fact that a short hospital stay can saddle a young person with crushing debt is only one of the many cruelties to be found in our current health care system. President Obama has promised to make health care reform a major component of his forthcoming budget plan. Let’s hope it makes life a little less cruel for the folks in this article and everyone else coping without health insurance.

One other interesting note about the Times article: it mentions a young woman who got hit by a car and subsequently turned her experiences into a one-woman show called Hot Cripple. I just want to point out that she totally stole the title of my planned memoir.

Late last week, Vice President Biden announced the appointment of Kareem Dale as Special Assistant to the President for Disability Policy. Dale is a longtime Obama associate and served as his disability advisor during the campaign. Dale is an attorney and he has a visual impairment. According to Biden, Dale will “have absolutely direct access to the president.”

Assuming that Dale really will have the president’s ear, it’s an encouraging sign that the administration will give serious attention to disability issues. In his remarks, Biden also acknowledged that the disability rights movement is part of the larger struggle for civil rights:

I started off in the civil rights movement. This is a civil rights movement. This is a movement to make sure that we guarantee that all peoples in the world have the opportunity to succeed to the degree they are capable.

That’s great, Mr. Vice President. Does that mean we can finally get around to ratifying the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities? Not to pressure you or anything, but Qatar and Azerbaijan have already ratified it. I’m just saying.