A Person and the Internet
I can't sleep right now, I hear Kerry speaking to Kerry!Mike and the laughter is keeping me up, which is a horrible thing for me to say, but it's the truth. It's like I can feel the happiness emanating from her room, and that's just not working for me right now.
We watched Grey's Anatomy tonight (that, along with several other shows that Kerry is getting me hooked on. But Ugly Betty is my chosen show, and Psych, I think, is mutual). It really struck me that Christina referred to Meredith as her 'person' because, well... in my internal dialog, I speak of 'my person' a lot. I don't have one right now, and it's what I've always wanted. I've sort of been looking for one since my friend and neighbor Leah moved away and I no longer had a best friend. I had a series of friends who... left me? I'm not sure what you call it. It's not a break-up, that's reserved for romantic relationships. People just... stopped talking much to me or being my friend until I met my best friend of 4th grade, Cynthia. And then she moved away. And Sam decided to switch schools and I never saw her much after that. And then Rachel moved away, and I think I began to give up. (I guess I resonate a bit with Meredith in that I also have "abandonment issues.")
I think because something happened when I tried to keep in touch with Leah, and because I had difficulty keeping in touch with Cindy for all the schoolwork I had to do (and those stupid stupid workbooks my Mom had me doing that only confirmed my hatred of math and made it harder to pretend that I didn't mind it), I started out believing that keeping in touch with a person was hopeless. I wonder if that's why I'm so bad at it? But it isn't impossible--I've talked to Cindy in the past year, and Rachel somehow found me through email (and the fact that I was VP of an anime club in college) a month or two ago. I'm just bad at it, maybe. Or I still don't fully believe in it. You can keep in touch with a person, but it's not the same. You stop having as much in common to talk about, you both grow and grow apart until you're in touch with someone else.
If there is anything I know about myself, I know that I was built to serve only one. Blame it on me being year of the Dog in the Chinese zodiac (by the Chinese or Lunar calendar, mind you), but... I need one person. One special person. It's like my grounding point--I can have many friends, and that's fine, but I want one person who knows me and whom I know and can count on. For a while, I thought that would be the person I love, but that might not be true. I'll have to learn to distinguish it, if it isn't the case, but seeing as I'm personless now (the closest one I have is Kerry, but proximity and high frequency of contact with the same person can skew things, so I don't know if I can count her as my person. I'm certainly not hers), I probably won't know for a while. Nevertheless, it's funny (both in a ha-ha and weird sense) to hear yourself echoed in a TV character. That's probably why we like characters in stories and TV so much, because we hear ourselves in them.
Ironically, earlier today I was telling a paladin that I've recently been hanging out with a bunch in WoW (we have having a 6'2" roommate in common, amusingly, and the roommate's fun, too) about Kylian's name. His name's a bit of an anomaly in my naming schemes for one reason--the name isn't mine. I tend to come up with all my names from something, even though Pueo was pretty much not mine either (Hawaiian for 'owl'). His name is from a book I was reading at the time, the title of which I cannot remember (and the story's a bit of a blur in my memory too, although I remember liking this character). It has a special meaning to me, and it is serving as a beacon to find someone.
I feel like I've told this story a million times before in my LJ and IRL, but I'll probably keep repeating it all my life. Back in the day, when I was young and hadn't yet learned HTML or any programming and I first got a taste of the internet, I got into MUSHes. A MUSH (Multi-User Shared Hallucination) is like a MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) in that it is a Zork-style-ish text game, but a MUSH is all RP within the world of the MUSH, where a MUD has a fighting system too, and you can kill mobs for experience etc. My first was called Furcadia--it's still around, but it's no longer text, and I'll get around to that in a minute. On the original, all text Furcadia I was K'Talia Ti'Dragonclaw, an antropomorphic panther of a reasonably high-ranking family. That's the full name--users saw me as just Talia (and ignore the wretched artwork, I was young and all I had was MS Paint... and I still suck). That was my first online handle. Ever.
As an interesting aside, back then Furcadia gave its players unlimited creation ability. Once I learned this, I began to learn to create objects in the world, starting with paltry things that just had descriptions and sat in the rooms to rooms themselves, then to interactive objects, hidden floating rooms, and the more complicated vehicles and puppets. I coded myself a huge mansion full of rooms, all with elaborate descriptions, secret passageways, a hanging tapestry you could step through, and a stairway that only let me walk through it (the gargoyles would growl at you and keep you from going through). The language of MUSHes is my first coding language, and why object-oriented programming makes so much sense to me. I taught it to myself, and I still carry the notes I took on making all these things with me. They're on my makeshift nightstand right now, and this is really what ultimately cued me in on wanting to learn to program (although, as another interesting aside, I apparently took an interest in coding when I was much, much younger and playing games on my Dad's Commodore 64, but my mother was against it. Just think what an awesome programmer I would have been! yeesh). Strange how unexpected little things change the direction of your life, no? Wanting to put up my shoddy character artwork for this character and others that came later is also what motivated me to teach myself HTML, which is part of why I keep the old images around on whatever happens to be my website (even if it is outdated and untouched by like 4 years or more by now).
Talia made some friends in Furcadia, and this was my first experience with online interactions with people. From the get-go, my dad taught me everything I needed to know about not taking what the person on the other end said seriously in a simple demonstration. He's the one that showed me what MUSHes were and got me into this, so he accompanied me on my first trips. One day, he was showing me how to do something, and another character came up and began to interact with mine (I was 14 at the time, but my character was 18). The guy was flirting. Funny guy my father is, he smiled at me and said, "Well, this could be fun." And flirted back. I was aghast at the absurdity of the situation (the guy thought he was flirting with an 18-year-old girl, but was in fact getting a 40-something man who was just playing with him), but in that one playful bit of banter, I learned pretty much everything I needed to know about caution and truth on the internet social scene (hence why I never ended up in one of those ridiculous MySpace scandal type deals--really, if more parents just accompanied their kids every once in a while and showed them a thing or two, they wouldn't be so gullible and easily taken advantage of!). But even so, I can believe a little from some people. My intuition isn't always right, but I tend to stick to my guns until I know it's not going to work. Amongst Talia's friends were a middle-classed fox, a poisons master rat, and a scarred and mangy coyote ruffian/bandit. Odd company for an upper-classed lady, you say? Being young and inexperienced in good roleplay, I picked the oh-so-typical a-stereotypical upper classed tomboy. Yup, I'm real original :P But when you're one of the few surviving members of your household, you get to do pretty much whatever you want.
My story is about the coyote, whom I got along with particularly well. Sadly, I can't remember his handle and only have vague remembrances of the sound of it and the meanings I associated with it. It meant 'garbage' or 'refuse' to me, but as my vocabulary wasn't strong enough to really catch things by common roots so much then, I can't be sure that this was actually the case (but his description of himself would support this interpretation). One day, he confessed to me that he had a crush on me. Mind you, I was 14 and I believed him to be 17... he believed me to be 18. I panicked, and didn't really know what to do, so I unwittingly told him a half-truth. I saw him as a bit of a big brother figure, because I got along with him so well and he would defend me a bit (as well as tease me... kinda Sakura & Touya-like, now that I think about it) around the others, and that's what I told him. I also told him my real age. What I never did tell him, and didn't really realize until much, much later, was that I did reciprocate those feelings and I really just didn't understand the kinship I felt with him. First cybercrush--I know, how cute and mushy. But it could have been either way, really... a really close friendship or a cybercrush. If he'd thought I was a guy, I think we would have just been really close friends, but at that age, close friendship between a guy and a girl becomes a crush, because we don't know what to do with love or want to know what it's like t be in love.
Things didn't get too awkward after that, thankfully, although I think he got a little more big brotherly protective of me. He gained some admin status, and was able to create a demi-god in the Furcadian world, and chose a white lion. I think he created the white lion before confessing to me, and I always thought he might have made that character a cat of noble standing to better match my character, but I think I enjoy the mismatch better :P When he got to creating things, one of the things he created for the world was a bar, and a bartender NPC. I believe the NPC was a tiger, and he asked me for a suggestion on what to name him. I was reading the book (the name of which, like the coyote's name, I can't remember) at the time, and suggested 'Kylian.' And he accepted it. Shortly after Kylian was created, though, the game closed and moved to a graphic format, and I couldn't find any of my friends in the new version (which I hated, because it removed my ability to describe myself however I pleased and build whatever I wanted). I lost them all.
My beloved striped white nightsaber pet in WoW is a sort of beacon, in the hopes that someday he'll be on my server (and on Alliance side... very very unlikely), see me and my tiger, and ask me. It's silly, I know, and extremely unlikely, but I don't know how else to do it. My coyote friend wouldn't know me by my now-standard handle of Oraxia--that was created several MUSHes later and then somehow stuck. I know he won't be the same person I knew back then, but we share a bit of our past... a link I want to touch again, for no good or explainable reason. My character in Furcadia, and the companionship of my canine/lupine friend, caused me to attempt my first long story, which was never quite written out and was an extremely childish bit of fairytale, but it inspired me. Maybe I've just been yearning for the inspiration I had back then and am tying it to this person, or just the curiosity I had back then of knowing who he was carrying into the present, but I'd like to see him again and ask him how he's doing, what he's up to.
There's the one thing I never really liked about the internet, because you lose people all the time. It's not like losing someone in real life--if you see them on the street again later, you'd have a chance of recognizing them. On the internet, people don't have a face the way they do in real life. I often wonder about my friends in WoW, especially after a particularly amusing hunter in my first guild left the game, that if I saw them in game again somewhere else--in another game or an online forum etc--would I recognize them? Would it even be plausible to try and keep in touch with them if I only know them by a non-unique handle? A relatively short arrangement of Roman characters? People on the internet, like words, are pretty much only the same in the same context. Take them out of context, and you can't be sure it's the same one again, even if they're similar. The original character Oraxia's Klingon-fluent brother from the UK and her Canadian friend who ended up dating him IRL--where are they? The elf Sana used to call Mr. Keebler when speaking out of character just to annoy him--where is he? Text lent them anonymity, and anonymity can be a two-edged sword. Maybe they don't want me to know who they are; maybe in some cases when things shut down, they had no choice. I can't know, but I want to--does that make me crazy? Is it crazy for me to want to have connections to people I've never seen, but have talked with so much? Maybe I am... but silly romantic ideals or no, this is a part of me. I miss you, my semi-imaginary friends. I miss you.
We watched Grey's Anatomy tonight (that, along with several other shows that Kerry is getting me hooked on. But Ugly Betty is my chosen show, and Psych, I think, is mutual). It really struck me that Christina referred to Meredith as her 'person' because, well... in my internal dialog, I speak of 'my person' a lot. I don't have one right now, and it's what I've always wanted. I've sort of been looking for one since my friend and neighbor Leah moved away and I no longer had a best friend. I had a series of friends who... left me? I'm not sure what you call it. It's not a break-up, that's reserved for romantic relationships. People just... stopped talking much to me or being my friend until I met my best friend of 4th grade, Cynthia. And then she moved away. And Sam decided to switch schools and I never saw her much after that. And then Rachel moved away, and I think I began to give up. (I guess I resonate a bit with Meredith in that I also have "abandonment issues.")
I think because something happened when I tried to keep in touch with Leah, and because I had difficulty keeping in touch with Cindy for all the schoolwork I had to do (and those stupid stupid workbooks my Mom had me doing that only confirmed my hatred of math and made it harder to pretend that I didn't mind it), I started out believing that keeping in touch with a person was hopeless. I wonder if that's why I'm so bad at it? But it isn't impossible--I've talked to Cindy in the past year, and Rachel somehow found me through email (and the fact that I was VP of an anime club in college) a month or two ago. I'm just bad at it, maybe. Or I still don't fully believe in it. You can keep in touch with a person, but it's not the same. You stop having as much in common to talk about, you both grow and grow apart until you're in touch with someone else.
If there is anything I know about myself, I know that I was built to serve only one. Blame it on me being year of the Dog in the Chinese zodiac (by the Chinese or Lunar calendar, mind you), but... I need one person. One special person. It's like my grounding point--I can have many friends, and that's fine, but I want one person who knows me and whom I know and can count on. For a while, I thought that would be the person I love, but that might not be true. I'll have to learn to distinguish it, if it isn't the case, but seeing as I'm personless now (the closest one I have is Kerry, but proximity and high frequency of contact with the same person can skew things, so I don't know if I can count her as my person. I'm certainly not hers), I probably won't know for a while. Nevertheless, it's funny (both in a ha-ha and weird sense) to hear yourself echoed in a TV character. That's probably why we like characters in stories and TV so much, because we hear ourselves in them.
Ironically, earlier today I was telling a paladin that I've recently been hanging out with a bunch in WoW (we have having a 6'2" roommate in common, amusingly, and the roommate's fun, too) about Kylian's name. His name's a bit of an anomaly in my naming schemes for one reason--the name isn't mine. I tend to come up with all my names from something, even though Pueo was pretty much not mine either (Hawaiian for 'owl'). His name is from a book I was reading at the time, the title of which I cannot remember (and the story's a bit of a blur in my memory too, although I remember liking this character). It has a special meaning to me, and it is serving as a beacon to find someone.
I feel like I've told this story a million times before in my LJ and IRL, but I'll probably keep repeating it all my life. Back in the day, when I was young and hadn't yet learned HTML or any programming and I first got a taste of the internet, I got into MUSHes. A MUSH (Multi-User Shared Hallucination) is like a MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) in that it is a Zork-style-ish text game, but a MUSH is all RP within the world of the MUSH, where a MUD has a fighting system too, and you can kill mobs for experience etc. My first was called Furcadia--it's still around, but it's no longer text, and I'll get around to that in a minute. On the original, all text Furcadia I was K'Talia Ti'Dragonclaw, an antropomorphic panther of a reasonably high-ranking family. That's the full name--users saw me as just Talia (and ignore the wretched artwork, I was young and all I had was MS Paint... and I still suck). That was my first online handle. Ever.
As an interesting aside, back then Furcadia gave its players unlimited creation ability. Once I learned this, I began to learn to create objects in the world, starting with paltry things that just had descriptions and sat in the rooms to rooms themselves, then to interactive objects, hidden floating rooms, and the more complicated vehicles and puppets. I coded myself a huge mansion full of rooms, all with elaborate descriptions, secret passageways, a hanging tapestry you could step through, and a stairway that only let me walk through it (the gargoyles would growl at you and keep you from going through). The language of MUSHes is my first coding language, and why object-oriented programming makes so much sense to me. I taught it to myself, and I still carry the notes I took on making all these things with me. They're on my makeshift nightstand right now, and this is really what ultimately cued me in on wanting to learn to program (although, as another interesting aside, I apparently took an interest in coding when I was much, much younger and playing games on my Dad's Commodore 64, but my mother was against it. Just think what an awesome programmer I would have been! yeesh). Strange how unexpected little things change the direction of your life, no? Wanting to put up my shoddy character artwork for this character and others that came later is also what motivated me to teach myself HTML, which is part of why I keep the old images around on whatever happens to be my website (even if it is outdated and untouched by like 4 years or more by now).
Talia made some friends in Furcadia, and this was my first experience with online interactions with people. From the get-go, my dad taught me everything I needed to know about not taking what the person on the other end said seriously in a simple demonstration. He's the one that showed me what MUSHes were and got me into this, so he accompanied me on my first trips. One day, he was showing me how to do something, and another character came up and began to interact with mine (I was 14 at the time, but my character was 18). The guy was flirting. Funny guy my father is, he smiled at me and said, "Well, this could be fun." And flirted back. I was aghast at the absurdity of the situation (the guy thought he was flirting with an 18-year-old girl, but was in fact getting a 40-something man who was just playing with him), but in that one playful bit of banter, I learned pretty much everything I needed to know about caution and truth on the internet social scene (hence why I never ended up in one of those ridiculous MySpace scandal type deals--really, if more parents just accompanied their kids every once in a while and showed them a thing or two, they wouldn't be so gullible and easily taken advantage of!). But even so, I can believe a little from some people. My intuition isn't always right, but I tend to stick to my guns until I know it's not going to work. Amongst Talia's friends were a middle-classed fox, a poisons master rat, and a scarred and mangy coyote ruffian/bandit. Odd company for an upper-classed lady, you say? Being young and inexperienced in good roleplay, I picked the oh-so-typical a-stereotypical upper classed tomboy. Yup, I'm real original :P But when you're one of the few surviving members of your household, you get to do pretty much whatever you want.
My story is about the coyote, whom I got along with particularly well. Sadly, I can't remember his handle and only have vague remembrances of the sound of it and the meanings I associated with it. It meant 'garbage' or 'refuse' to me, but as my vocabulary wasn't strong enough to really catch things by common roots so much then, I can't be sure that this was actually the case (but his description of himself would support this interpretation). One day, he confessed to me that he had a crush on me. Mind you, I was 14 and I believed him to be 17... he believed me to be 18. I panicked, and didn't really know what to do, so I unwittingly told him a half-truth. I saw him as a bit of a big brother figure, because I got along with him so well and he would defend me a bit (as well as tease me... kinda Sakura & Touya-like, now that I think about it) around the others, and that's what I told him. I also told him my real age. What I never did tell him, and didn't really realize until much, much later, was that I did reciprocate those feelings and I really just didn't understand the kinship I felt with him. First cybercrush--I know, how cute and mushy. But it could have been either way, really... a really close friendship or a cybercrush. If he'd thought I was a guy, I think we would have just been really close friends, but at that age, close friendship between a guy and a girl becomes a crush, because we don't know what to do with love or want to know what it's like t be in love.
Things didn't get too awkward after that, thankfully, although I think he got a little more big brotherly protective of me. He gained some admin status, and was able to create a demi-god in the Furcadian world, and chose a white lion. I think he created the white lion before confessing to me, and I always thought he might have made that character a cat of noble standing to better match my character, but I think I enjoy the mismatch better :P When he got to creating things, one of the things he created for the world was a bar, and a bartender NPC. I believe the NPC was a tiger, and he asked me for a suggestion on what to name him. I was reading the book (the name of which, like the coyote's name, I can't remember) at the time, and suggested 'Kylian.' And he accepted it. Shortly after Kylian was created, though, the game closed and moved to a graphic format, and I couldn't find any of my friends in the new version (which I hated, because it removed my ability to describe myself however I pleased and build whatever I wanted). I lost them all.
My beloved striped white nightsaber pet in WoW is a sort of beacon, in the hopes that someday he'll be on my server (and on Alliance side... very very unlikely), see me and my tiger, and ask me. It's silly, I know, and extremely unlikely, but I don't know how else to do it. My coyote friend wouldn't know me by my now-standard handle of Oraxia--that was created several MUSHes later and then somehow stuck. I know he won't be the same person I knew back then, but we share a bit of our past... a link I want to touch again, for no good or explainable reason. My character in Furcadia, and the companionship of my canine/lupine friend, caused me to attempt my first long story, which was never quite written out and was an extremely childish bit of fairytale, but it inspired me. Maybe I've just been yearning for the inspiration I had back then and am tying it to this person, or just the curiosity I had back then of knowing who he was carrying into the present, but I'd like to see him again and ask him how he's doing, what he's up to.
There's the one thing I never really liked about the internet, because you lose people all the time. It's not like losing someone in real life--if you see them on the street again later, you'd have a chance of recognizing them. On the internet, people don't have a face the way they do in real life. I often wonder about my friends in WoW, especially after a particularly amusing hunter in my first guild left the game, that if I saw them in game again somewhere else--in another game or an online forum etc--would I recognize them? Would it even be plausible to try and keep in touch with them if I only know them by a non-unique handle? A relatively short arrangement of Roman characters? People on the internet, like words, are pretty much only the same in the same context. Take them out of context, and you can't be sure it's the same one again, even if they're similar. The original character Oraxia's Klingon-fluent brother from the UK and her Canadian friend who ended up dating him IRL--where are they? The elf Sana used to call Mr. Keebler when speaking out of character just to annoy him--where is he? Text lent them anonymity, and anonymity can be a two-edged sword. Maybe they don't want me to know who they are; maybe in some cases when things shut down, they had no choice. I can't know, but I want to--does that make me crazy? Is it crazy for me to want to have connections to people I've never seen, but have talked with so much? Maybe I am... but silly romantic ideals or no, this is a part of me. I miss you, my semi-imaginary friends. I miss you.