blogpal post

Have you ever had a penpal? Well I have a blogpal; she lives a good distance around the globe from me, and we've never met, but we have a mutual friend who reads us both, and we've started reading each other as well. Recently she posted something like something I'd been thinking about posting. So I'm initiating blogpal post #1, which means I'm responding directly to her, with all of you looking on. :)

This blogpal was writing about the Web and the way it teases you into feeling connected yet leaves a very I'm-alone aftertaste in your mouth. And I get that; I've felt that. Sometimes I am shocked by the number of times I drop by my computer, when doing something elsewhere in my apartment, to see if a new email has come in or a new post has popped up in Google Reader. It's true that my gmail account is open all the time—I live alone, I work at home; why close it? And because I don't, and because it re-loads itself, I tend to persistently check in on it. And because I spend a lot of my time one-on-one with the computer (as that's where all my work gets done, not to mention my writing), and because it is the easiest means of communicating with my friends and family, of following the news, of shopping, of checking the weather forecast, of playing Scrabble, of being connected to you right now—because it has become an incredible source of mental interaction with the world, I do at times find myself feeling an emotional tug toward it and then sometimes a sense of letdown when all the green circles in my gchat bar have gone orange or gray and I remember that I am, really, by myself at the computer.

But there are times when I think that interconnectedness is incredible. Recently, a friend went through a very tough week of sitting in a hospital waiting for her dad to come through surgery and finding at the end that more treatment was needed. She couldn't necessarily talk on the phone while there, so it felt good to be able to sit with her on gchat for hours and type this or that back and forth. We were both doing other things but we kept up a running chatter, and I felt as close to being there keeping her company as is possible from 3,000 miles away, which felt very good. Similarly, there are friends—and relatives—who I rarely used to hear from by phone but who regularly send me hellos and little updates through gchat or Facebook. And I've been able to edit every single English essay my former tutee in Boston has written in the past two years via gchat, as he literally sends me paragraph after paragraph, interspersed with queries like "Is that a thesis statement?" and "Did I support my point ok?"

So for all the bizarrity of developing a fond feeling toward a machine or something displayed on its screen, I appreciate that during the workday, as I sit here doing my business in solitary, there are 15 or 20 of you seemingly right there with me, sharing the latest news article you liked or a witty quip about politics or your recent adventures in your status bar. I like having this little-green-dot community alongside me, having all this information around me to peruse during breaks, having it be my turn to play a word against someone I haven't seen in 15 years but am delighted to be back in touch with.

I realize that enjoying that puts me at risk of getting attached to it as reality, of feeling I can't live without it, of feeling disappointment when I have it in hand but it's giving nothing back to me. So I make a point of enjoying the interconnectedness when I am for some purpose at the computer—and forgetting it the rest of the time. And I think that’s key—to resist relying on it, or expecting it to be more than it is. After all, everything on the Web is constructed and being constantly re-constructed; so it's a fickle creature, becoming only what a bunch of humans here or a bunch of humans there shape it to be.