For a brief while, I’ve been unable to remember why I’d deleted my MySpace account, which is really somewhat senseless.
What am I doing? I think to myself, quite often, while I browse the MySpace profiles of the people with whom I used to be MySpace friends. Lately, when darkness falls on weeknights, I am wide awake and left with a dilemma: do something boring (i.e. balance my checkbook, do some laundry, etc), or waste time. Oh, how sweet it is, when I waste time; when I dance to 80s music, when I watch Nick @ Nite, when I blog. But there’s nothing sweeter than wasting time with some secret MySpace action.
When I dumped the online social network to embrace reality, I didn’t think I’d ever look back. Ever. But every night, around 9p.m., something would knock at my brain. MySpace, that something would whisper. You need MySpace. And in front of my computer, I’d sit, and I’d think about MySpace. I’d think about all the 9p.m.’s I’d spent sitting before the site. And for months, I could step away from the computer.
But, eventually, I did the unthinkable. Like a recovering alcoholic parking “the wagon” in front of a bar and staring at its front door, I typed the once-forbidden letters and watched MySpace.com load. Familiarity, I sighed and probably smiled. And then, like a recovering alcoholic walking into the bar and looking around, I began to search for my friends.
Oh, the lure: the comments, the bulletins, the friend requests…and the top eight. Oh, the envied top eight! But after my ranting, my raving and my pretty public denunciation of MySpace on lifeteen.com, I knew creating a new account would be an act of preposterous hypocrisy. And that’s why when a friend offered to create, operate and maintain a MySpace in memory of my MySpace, I jumped on it. A few senseless weeks have passed. And during most of this time, I’ve failed to recollect why I ever left the network.
“Any new friend requests?” I asked Kerri. “And while you’re at it, check my profile views!”
“One request, and 64 views.”
“Sixty-four? That’s it? What a rip off!”
Why on earth haven’t more people looked at my profile? At me?
And there you have it. There, I had it, actually. And, if I might, I’d like to quote myself with the words I used in my story on lifeteen.com: “But the longer I used (MySpace), the more it fostered a sickening obsession with myself…”
No, after allowing someone to essentially operate a MySpace in my name, I’m not obsessed with myself – well, with my hair, maybe, which is irrelevant. But then what, you might ask, keeps me craving MySpace? It’s the lure. And I’m not just talking about the pointless fun found in bulletin surveys, or the curious excitement found in brand new friend requests. The lure comes from years – and I mean years – of having relied too heavily upon Internet communication. Like the lifeblood that keeps us living, computer mediated communication keeps the cravings some of us have for connection satiated. And if anyone has developed an ability to “connect” with others via ICQ, until I found AIM and via AIM, until I found MySpace, it’s probably me.
And my heart would pound, and the room would seem to grow cold: New Messages. Please be from him, please be from him. Yes! And I’d open the message, and there I’d see it: “Haha, that’s funny! Talk to you later.” He laughed, I made him laugh, and we share so many interests, is it love? NO.
It’s the false sense of intimacy that’s going to take so much away from our abilities to “commune” face to face, if it hasn’t already.
Today, I came to my senses.
Disclaimer: The above scenario during which “I” contemplated having fallen in love by way of MySpace was, in fact, a fabricated scenario. I was never that bad. lol.
Filed under: Life
Almost three years ago, I sat in a rundown movie theater between Laurel and Kyle. Elf played, we laughed, it ended and then, we met Ben at Pizza Hut. A simple 18th birthday, yes – but one of my best. So when a friend dropped me an email last week the day after her 18th birthday, bearing regrets and a picture of the spur-of-the-moment tattoo she wished she hadn’t gotten, I couldn’t entirely relate.
But that’s only because I’ve never gotten a tattoo.
I have, however, said and done a few things that – thanks to nobody but me – stick around sort of like the ink in Kerri’s tattoo. There’s no point in wallowing over the things we can’t erase, figuratively and sometimes literally speaking. To wallow over the tattoos we wish we hadn’t gotten, the times we stuck our feet in our mouths, the birthdays we forgot and the sins we committed is like shifting the car into drive and hitting the gas, but straining our necks and looking behind us instead of straight ahead. If we tried driving our cars forward without looking anywhere but behind, we’d crash in a matter of minutes.
Same with life.
Jack Black is probably smarter than he sounds. During a recent CNN interview, a reporter asked him about the inhibitions he must have experienced while filming Nacho Libre. Like any other fat slob would, he admitted being uncomfortable prancing around topless wearing Spandex tights in front of hundreds of people. I can only imagine the “what will they think of me?” thoughts that must’ve crossed his mind, and the unavoidable shame he probably felt in doing something he’d really rather not have to do.
“But then, I do a little meditation,” he said. “And I find the inner ‘who cares?’, and then I go.”
Brilliant, that Jack Black.
I’ve always been a people pleaser: one of those quick-to-RSVP, promise making, yes-saying people pleasers who cares entirely too much and has over-booked and double-booked herself more times than she’s willing to admit. And people pleasers, like I, find it excrutiating to say “no” or “I can’t,” risking disappointed remarks from let-down friends (and sometimes strangers).
I realized this morning that a lot of adulthood will require finding my “inner who cares.” It’s not selfish, it’s self preserving. I’m not Wonder Woman (I know, shocking!), and I can’t do it all. Some events will be skipped, some phone calls will be left unanswered, some spelling errors will remain incorrect especially if my friends don’t have the chops to correct my blunders without remaining anonymous as if they assume I’ll take offense to their constructive criticism, some friends might feel neglected (I’ll be back, don’t worry) and some TV shows will be missed.
I need to be more like Jack Black. For me, saying no is a lot like being fat and dancing around in Spandex. I don’t want to do it; but sometimes, like in Jack Black’s case, it needs to be done. When you’ve got more on your plate than you could possibly ever consume in one sitting, some food – no matter how tempting - has to be tossed. And that’s when being able to find the ”inner ‘who cares?’” will come in handy.
Filed under: Life
Some of the pains in my neck yesterday afternoon, like the literal ones after a couple of roller coaster rides at a nearby theme park, and the carful of waving and wide eyed entirely-too-young-to-be-out-without-a-parental-guardian boys traveling beside us, didn’t bother me at all.
The bothersome pains, the buildings crowding either side of the narrow street like way too many peas packed into a really tiny pod and the crosswalks teeming with tourists who couldn’t care less that the exhaust fumes of countless cars breathed down the necks of their swim-suited bodies, disgusted me.
Westbound and lost on International Drive in Orlando, for some reason, is a state of being that can give my friend and me the motive to dive directly into the deep end of philosophical conversation. So while we stopped and went to the rhythm of the traffic lights down International Drive in its entirety, we agreed that such a crowded and fake stretch of land makes us feel empty. And while we pondered what it might be like to embellish the back yards we’ve yet to aquire with our own roller coasters (so that we don’t have to risk getting stuck on International Drive any more for that sort of thrill), we agreed that we’ve been duped.
“Life is good.” We mocked the phrase because we hear it all the time. And it isn’t true, just so you know. Before you pop a gasket or drop an outraged comment, allow me to add that life isn’t good because it isn’t supposed to be good. Life is supposed to be an unpredictable array of mountains and vallies. It’s supposed to be an unprecedented series of learning experiences. It’s supposed to piss us off, make us happy, prove us wrong and prove us right. But it’s hard to accept the downs with the ups when things like TV, movies and International Drive have tried for 20 years to get us believing that we can achieve the unachievable perfect life, and we can reach the non-existent point at which “this is it” and life is good from here on out, and there’s no reason or need to continue trying.
“Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on,” once said Samuel Butler. It’s TV, movies and International Drive that dupe us into thinking that one of these days, we’ll be sudden virtuosi. So in the meantime, we sit back, relax and wait for beautiful, painless music to flow out from within us. But Butler said it. This ”violin” of life is an instrument we’re learning to play as we go along. We’re supposed to learn to play as we go along because no one is born a virtuoso.
Just like it’s a pain in the neck to find yourself stuck in a place that’s crowded, fake and uncomfortable (where it’s easier to pull over and take a nap rather than backtrack until you find your way home, or easier to pretend you aren’t lost) it’s a pain in the neck to find yourself breaking strings or making mistakes right in the middle of a performance. It’s easier to slip your violin into a protective case and call it broken than it is to restring or to start the song over.
We’re not supposed to be practicing so that we won’t need to practice anymore. And we’re not practicing in order to eventually give grand and flawless performances. The life of practice is the performance. And sometimes, the show will stink. But with the vallies and the mountains, the show will get worse and better again when we stop pretending that we’re masters and learn from our mistakes.
Two and a half hours ’til my next takeoff. I’m sitting in the Atlanta Airport thinking about my flight from Tampa.
Five minutes into my earlier flight, we had an hour left until our scheduled landing. Planet earth is pretty spectacular from that altitude, or Tampa at least. Beneath me, what looked like a still life photograph became smaller and separate from the plane by a thin layer of motionless clouds. And then, I saw it: a bridge, traveled by thousands of ant-sized cars. The lifeless world below me suddenly seemed lifelike, and real and wonderful. “Are those parking lots?” I thought to myself. “No, those are neighborhoods.”
What a fabulous reminder that this earth is much bigger than the world I know.
