Friendship isn't convenient
I've been thinking about this for months. It's not directed at anyone or describing someone's behavior. I'm just noodling this out, and today is the day I hit post.
=================
In 1991 I used a computer to post to a network-visible text file, called a plan. Oh, hello journal long impulse. I've hung out on message boards of sundry vintages, sizes and connection methods. I've run them, administered them, and disciplined them.
I registered a domain name in 1998, and I lovingly linked my chronological postings forwards and backwards in sequence. In 1999 I conducted a fairly public romance there, even if I described the worst of its drawn out ending elsewhere. Though still in an Internet way. Those people listening probably saved some pieces of me.
Back to that domain name--I wrote two and three sentence distillations of observation and my experiences. I loved the seeing, the describing, the suggestion of an ending. I negotiated and navigated privacy in some weird ways. Like when I sat across the table from my second cousin, then dying of brain cancer, when that he missed tattletale. Him a proper editor missed the stones I threw in the pond.
(long digression about learning too late that's could have a Boston publishing internship right out of college.)
=======================
I've met with many of my imaginary friends, and I've mourned one of them hard. And now everyone takes this Internet sharing for granted, when once it was just deeply weird.
You're probably not going to get too much out of me anymore. I'm cagier. I'm exposed to my boss and her boss I feel quite overwhelmingly a surge of been there/done that. I'll be somewhere in my old haunts when I'm het up and scared. And now I find the delete button when my feathers lay in order again.
Here is what I want to tell you, you the person that is my friend: I want to be your friend. Not your audience. I want to know what is going on in your life, but not from the equivalent of a newsletter. Not solely from that newsletter. If that is your thing,then by god do it and I will read the good goddamn out of it.
But be willing for me to forget what you said, to ask for some more details and disregard others. Conversation isn't a reading comprehension test. If I only wanted to talk with the personas my friends play on the Internet, I'd just prepare my thumbs up button.
Some of you are excellent writers and I would rather have the story in your other exhausted just between you and me words in addition to the polished ones. Some of you are less accomplished, or hurried, or whoopstheonscreenkeyboardscrambled something you didn't have the time to notice.
I want to talk to you as an individual, the kind of talk where words tumble on top of each other and get crazy tangled and the layers of tangent compresses like sediment turning to sandstone. For most folks that requires voices. Some of us can do it with SMS or instant messaging. Still fewer can with email or asynchronous long form writing without making a presentation instead conversation.
I don't want to (always have to) respond to you and what's going on in your life in a comment box. Not as a notch in your internet belt. Not simultaneously will all other people. That comment box takes a real careful mix of humanity to make conversation. And sometimes I feel a bit irrelevant in there.
I'll still read your online life. I as much a modern-day word voyeur as the next gal.
What I am saying is--listen hard now-- I want to to talk to you. In the inconvenient way.
Posted via LiveJournal app for iPad.