Two years ago I went on a quest to find some old friends. I searched internet sites where I thought I was likely to find people – MySpace, Classmates, Amateur Porn Sites, etc. I found one or two old friends, but for the most part the experiment was a huge failure. What I discovered was that I was the only guy on the internet.
Well, not the only guy – I had plenty of online friends who were also, obviously, on the internet – but no one I knew in real life had a presence on the internet. But, I figured, no big deal. Not everyone was a computer guy, not everyone was a blogger, and not everyone had high-speed internet at home. I would wait, I thought, though I didn’t know for what I was waiting.
It has recently become clear that I was waiting for Facebook. Holy Crap, the entire world has embraced Facebook. I have friended so many people in just the last couple of weeks that I think I now have a Facebook friend from every stage of my life, starting before grade school and continuing all the way to my current co-workers. What I’ve realized is that, while I’ve often dreamt of the moment when I would have everyone I’ve ever known all in one place, the dream was never what I would call “pleasant” and I’d often wake from it screaming.
When I first started writing in a public forum, I was young and still struggled with the reality that my mom was going to read everything I wrote. For a while this kept some of my thoughts in check – like I’d never write about my feelings toward semi-hot female celebrities, even if most of the time it was all in fun. As I matured, and my relationship with my mom matured, I eased the reins on my imagination and eventually just let the horses run where they would. This was a positive step in my writing, and I was glad to be over the hurdle.
I fear that with the Facebook floodgates open, I have just turned the last corner of my race and discovered not two or three evenly spaced hurdles, but a gigantic mess of hurdles of all shapes and sized piled haphazardly atop each other and stretching all the way to the finish line.
I’ve got some stuff to work out, I mean.
This time, however, it is not just about the careful inclusion and exclusion of topics. I’ve never been super-raw anyway, so the occasional check is all that’s needed to keep it all-ages. My real concern is that I won’t be on all the time, and with more and more people watching, being on all the time is a must.
What I think I mean is that it’s cool, even somewhat edgy, to suck when only people you don’t know are reading. Negative comments from strangers just add fuel to the creative fire and responding to these comments is a great way to pass time. But, when your neighbor comes over and says, “hey, I read your blog the other day and it was sort of boring,” it gets personal, and a bit uncomfortable.
That’s how it boils down – I find myself over-thinking everything I want to write and realize that without some new angle or some actual research, it’s just me talking about stuff, and no one wants to read that. It’s a bit like Eminem says – “If you had one shot, one opportunity, to seize everything you ever wanted. Would you capture it, or just let it slip?” I feel like every post is an opportunity to convince someone other than myself that the post is worthy of something. But, more often than not, this puts so much pressure on the post to be balls-out perfect that I end up falling short because I can’t quite find that universal truth that brings it around and makes it worthy of attention.
So, while I am super-psyched to connect with current friends and re-connect with old friends, the fact that all of these connections are happening online, a space I used to go to be, not a complete other person, but someone a little different than I am in real life, it makes it a little weird. It’s like your aunt coming into town on the same day as that girl you went out with a couple of times in college, and they both want to go to dinner with you. As those two worlds collide, the conversation becomes awkward, at best. My worlds are colliding, and it’s possible that in time it will become comfortable, but right now it feels like wool sheets on a straw mattress.
