day one: morning
8:45am and I'm wondering if this virtual communication business extends to talking to the cat. I know he can't understand me no matter what I say, and when he's gnawing on my leg the first thing I think of isn't texting "AAAH FUCK GODDAMN KITTEN NEEDLE TEETH" to Twitter.
I can't really even consider this an all-day thing, which makes today feel like cheating. I've got class from 11:15-1:10 and then from 6:00pm-8:00pm, and I work in between. I'm still going to Bar Bleu tonight to see Dan do his first open mic night - I suppose not talking in a bar is preferable to shouting to be heard over the speakers.
It would feel less like cheating if I could get away with not talking during class and work. But class I suppose is general communication already, isn't it? Necessarily it's constrained to the people in that room, but one could also say that general communication via Facebook is the same in that the audience must be somehow limited. And since I picked up a shift in the store at work today I'll have to be talking directly to customers. Not like most of them view student food services employees as people anyway. I may as well be communicating with them via AIM for all the depth of personal connection there.
Kevin had a suggestion - really, I should attribute this whole thing to him, it was his idea and otherwise I was finding myself basically fucked - of expressing my emotions in person in the form of emoticon cards. It sounds absolutely ridiculous but something about using emoticons in general is rather ridiculous. When we can't express feelings in any meaningful way, we resort to artfully positioned pieces of punctuation. A colan and the end of parentheses is somehow supposed to convey all of the happiness in the world.
For anyone who's curious (I'm curious as to who is reading this from Facebook or anywhere else - I'm still not going to stop swearing), this is for my Cyber Culture class. Kevin and I filled a good hour on the bus yesterday discussing this and the class itself. It's frustrated me a bit because parts of it seem to stuck in the 1990s and in cyberpunk and hacking, down with the machine. I'm not a hacker. I can't even begin to understand the workings of computers (if only muttered "fucks" and "goddamns" at them formed a sort of incantation that would make them work). But hey, I've had an online journal in some form since I was 14. That's nine years of my life lived writing to an internet audience. Before that, it was the sailormoon.org message boards (what resulted from that many years later when I was 21 is a whole 'nuther story). Otaku Booty, Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal communities, countless other message boards and internet forums - that is my cyber culture. So for the next few days, it's forget the physical body; it's just a shell for the virtual presence.
["Cinco de Filch" icon because hey, why not.]