ramblings

It stays hot — even here, at 5797 feet — too late on summer nights for me to be able to go to sleep at a reasonable hour, which explains at least in part what I’m doing up at this hour writing and making chicken stock. Well, it explains the up part. The chicken stock part is because I have this chicken carcass that needs to be made into stock, and it’s way too warm during the day to heat up that much for that long, so I figured I might as well do it now.

The writing part is just a sudden desire to try to articulate a few things I’ve been thinking about.

I spend a lot of time thinking about my online presence and its various manifestations and how those have influenced, and in some cases created, the friendships in my life. Of course, I also spend a lot of time online, tinkering with various aspects of this presence and talking to my friends and my “friends,” and so it is perhaps not surprising that I think about it quite a bit, too.

At the moment, it breaks down kind of like this

• This here blog is supposedly the real me, but it tends to get neglected far more than anything else.
• lis.dom is the library me
• Facebook is the place for people I went to high school with and other strangers from the past to find me. I’ve had a website of some sort or other since 1999, so it’s not like I’ve been hiding, but I guess a lot of people who don’t really want to find you are down with finding you on Facebook. I used to play Scabulous on Facebook, too, but I couldn’t keep up.
• Flickr is where I always intend to put more pictures that I forever intend to take.
• Twitter is on hold while I sort out my relationship with it.
• FriendFeed is where I spend most of my time.

By next month, of course, all of that could change.

I was just saying today to my friend Steve that (and I quote, from my own IM transcript): “I also sort of wish this kind of thing had been around when I was young and convinced no one else had my problems — although that may be a function of being young, not of medium.”

Reading, it has always seemed to me, serves two purposes: it reminds you on the one hand that there are a lot of people who are not like you and that on the other hand there are a lot of people just like you. I’ve always thought of reading in that sense as meaning reading books, but reading FriendFeed will give you much the same experience. And that means that those of us who face the world best by reading about it suddenly have a whole new place and way to encounter the world.

I might well have found some new world just as wonderful by some other route, but I think I can’t discount the medium in this case. The medium isn’t the message — as the Twitter-to-FriendFeed defection showed, I think a lot of us don’t feel brand loyalty — but it is the means (and perhaps someday we’ll have social network protocols as the means?). All those invisible ones and zeroes, all those packets pinballing around through the network — they make this thing, whatever it is that we have here.

I am trying to regard it as one of the blessings of this summer that I have not yet had a bad peach.

Given war, natural disasters, the collapse of various financial markets, deaths, and anxiety, it doesn’t seem like much of a blessing, but I’m trying to think of it that way.

And these have been just ordinary grocery store peaches, not the wonderful ones that I bought thirty pounds of a few years back that were selling from a roadside stand. These have just been on sale at the grocery store for $1.49 a pound, and I get a few every time I go, and they’ve all been good.

I never used to like summer much — school was out, which many people liked, but as school was something I was good at and summer activities were mostly things I was not good at, I sort of missed it. Fresh fruit was sort of my consolation prize for summer. It was hot and muggy and people were forever telling you to go play outside, where it was even more hot and muggy, but you got fresh peaches, and strawberries and blueberries and cherries and plums and melons and even mulberries, which are not really very good but which I ate in large quantities because we always seemed to have a mulberry tree in our yard.

I was a late-comer to cherries. I’d always thought I didn’t like them, since I never liked anything cherry flavored. Then the summer we were fourteen I stayed for a week in New Jersey with my oldest friend, who was living there with some family friends for the summer. We went into New York City almost every day, and when we got out of the train station, we’d walk along until we found a fruit vendor, and Sara would say, “We’d like a pound of cherries, please.” Then we walked along the streets of Manhattan, eating cherries out of a brown paper bag and spitting the pits into the gutters. We’d walk and eat until we’d finished the pound, and then, more often than not, we’d happen upon another fruit vendor and say, “We’d like a pound of cherries, please.”

I don’t eat cherries in quite that kind of quantity anymore, but as soon as I see them in the supermarket, I buy some (and then, because I am old, I take them home and wash them and put the pits I’ve spat out into the garbage can) and think about being fourteen and fifteen and seeing New York for the very first time.

So on days like today when the world seems to be not too great, which is how it generally seemed all the time when I was in high school, I am trying to be thankful for fruit.

I’m writing this from a Java House in Iowa City, the one over on the west side of town that’s now part of this mini mall that, when I was in high school, was a field of wildflowers. Come to think of it, the Java House did not exist when I was in high school. I remember going to the one downtown during my first winter break home from college and thinking how pretentious it was. Sometimes I still think that, but given the hours of my life that I have now spent idling away in fancy coffee shops, I should admit to being either pretentious or hypocritical myself. Or both.

When people say, “I just couldn’t keep it to myself,” they usually mean that they have good news (or even the Good News). Mine is not good news. I’ve been pondering a good deal lately about the nature of online communication and whether, when we post something either good or bad, we are doing so in order to be informative or in order to garner accolades or condolences. I haven’t come up with an answer, but I have realized that, for me, the online world and the regular world have bled into each other so much that I can’t always separate out what happens in my real life into distinct parcels that fit neatly into pre-printed grids. I was always fairly good at coloring inside the lines when I was a kid, and I used to hate it when I made mistakes. Some years later, it seems to me as though mistakes are pretty much the currency we trade in, if we’re honest.

Friday afternoon, my godson, Phelim Andrew Thurston, the son of my oldest friend in the world, died suddenly. He was not quite eight months old.

When I was last in Iowa City, my mother, our friend Alice, and I held a baptism for Phelim in my mom’s house. I never got to take a formal picture of us all, and there are more pictures of Phelim’s older brother, Imriel, in that set than of Phelim himself, who was at that time still quite tiny and hooked up to a monitor. He was born prematurely and spent several weeks in the neo-natal intensive care unit, and some months after that connected to a monitor. He was given a clean bill of health after that, though, and seemed to be thriving. You can see him flirting with his mom in this little video.

I got the news Friday afternoon when I got home from work. Before dawn on Saturday I was in my car and headed to Worland, WY, where I got on an eighteen-seat plane with three passengers headed to Denver by way of Laramie. I got into Chicago that afternoon and was practically apoplectic at seeing gas for $4.39 a gallon on the cab ride to my grandmother’s, where I spent the night as I was exhausted beyond measure. It turned out to be just as well, since I wouldn’t have been able to leave that day anyway.

I generally fly to Chicago because it’s almost always cheaper than flying to Iowa, and in this case there was the added bonus that I’d be able to use my mother’s car, which was at my grandmother’s because my mother had left it there when she took the train out to Boston, where she’s spending a month learning about street ministry. The difficulty lay in the location of the keys to my mother’s car, which, after numerous phone calls (including one to Triple A to get the car unlocked, because at one point we thought the key was in it), we finally learned was on my cousin’s dresser in his apartment, which was all very well except that he was in Peoria for the weekend along with the other people who might have had a key to his place, and we had to wait until six o’clock last night for them to return so that we could get the key so that I could drive to Iowa City, which is only about three and half hours away. I got in late last night, after the extreme disappointment of stopping at the Mobil Mart in Rock Falls for a doughnut only to find that not only do they not have Krsipy Kreme doughnuts any more, they also had no doughnuts of any sort at all. (And Firefox, apparently, accepts donut but not doughnut. Gar.)

I’ll be here for a week, at least. I am extremely grateful to my director, Frances, for telling me to go ahead and take off and we’d figure out my timesheet later, and to my coworkers, for covering everything in my absence.

And thank you to all of you. Those on Twitter got this news a few days ago; this is the first time I’ve been able to sit still for long enough to write the rest of it down. If you are a praying sort, please say a prayer for Caitrin, my friend, for baby Phelim, and for Imriel, Ileana, and Delaney, his older brother and half-sisters, and Sam, Phelim and Imriel’s father. And thank you all, again.

Facebook is really making me wonder if I need to reevaluate my entire high school experience.

I did not like high school.  I spent as little time there as possible, but it was still far too much.  If I had to do it over again, I’d drop out the day I turned sixteen, take some college classes, read a lot, and get a GED.

But then, you see, I joined Facebook.  And then I started getting friend requests from people I knew in high school.  A few are people I was at least friendly with, but there are plenty of others I can scarcely remember, and some I remember actively disliking me.

Of course, Facebook is in part about gathering “friends,” and some people are heavily invested in getting their numbers up, and that may account for part of it.  And I have observed that people you know who haven’t seen you in a long time invariably treat you as a long-lost friend, regardless of how little they liked you back when.

A few weeks ago I got a message from a long-lost high school acquaintance in which said acquaintance mentioned that he’d always had a crush on me.  I did not date in high school.  I did not even come close.  I certainly didn’t think anyone came even close to harboring an affection for me.  But apparently I was wrong — and knowing that has made me start to wonder how many other impressions I had that were incorrect.  And that in turn leads me to wonder if I had a whole other possible high school existence, a sort of parallel track that I never found a way to hop on.  It’s almost enough to make me wish I could go back and do it again — but not quite enough.  I think I’d still hate gym class, lockers, bells, the smell of the cafeteria, and my AP English teacher.