american ethos and modern loneliness, but what's it got to do with Facebook?

since becoming unemployed and moving to a locale with lack of excellent weather, proliferation of mosquitoes and other blood-sucking bugs, and a lack of attractions, i've spent most mornings (into nights) reading articles on the internet and learning a lot. although i abhorred being unemployed for the good part of my summer, i have recently (read: as of JUST NOW) come to LOVE it. thank god for the internet and Wikipedia. i can spend literally DAYS opening millions of tabs and consuming them voraciously. gobble gobble!

i spent this morning reading a long list of terrific articles online, nytimes and newsweek and gizmodo and mostly, and thought i'd share this really great article, a review less about the upcoming Facebook movie than a consideration of modern loneliness and social debilitation as a result of / exacerbated by / evidenced by technologies such as Facebook. extremely extremely fascinating (consider: debilitation caused not by lack of access but by TOO much availability, social disability as a result of excess of mediums). great, great stuff!

some highlights from the article, in case you do actually have a day job and need to be on your way:

Fifty years before Mark Zuckerberg arrived at Harvard—back when facebooks were actually books, back when poking a friend had a whole different set of connotations—Thornton Wilder came to campus to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. He devoted one of them to “the loneliness that accompanies independence and the uneasiness that accompanies freedom.” Raising such difficult subjects made him uncomfortable, he recalled later, but he felt better knowing that all of his listeners were American. It meant that “these experiences are not foreign to anyone here.”

The film turns out to have less in common with other campus caper flicks than with Freedom, Jonathan Franzen’s masterful new novel about an imploding family. Nobody comes right out and says that Zuckerberg and his associates (I almost said friends) don’t know how to live, as someone says of the Berglunds early in Franzen’s book, but the trouble appears to be the same. And the reason why both the book and the film resonate—why they stick with you afterward—is that plenty of the rest of us have that trouble too. By suggesting that a modern kind of loneliness led an obnoxious hacker to start Facebook, the film helps pinpoint our own loneliness—the feelings of aimlessness and isolation that make us do things like sign up for Facebook.

Zuckerberg and his employees spend enormous time and energy trying to make people connect to each other via their online social network, but they’ve got the situation backward. The route to a happy life, let alone a meaningful one, doesn’t lie in escaping loneliness. As Wilder tried to tell his audience, it is an inescapable part of living in a country as big and free and unencumbered as this one. The trick for us, and for the people around the world living as we do, lies in using our loneliness. Wilder stated the challenge best and for all time when he described “the typical American battle of trying to convert a loneliness into an enriched and fruitful solitude.” Like the Berglunds—or another touchstone of contemporary culture, Don Draper—these characters can’t get along with each other because they haven’t learned to get along with, and don’t even really know, themselves.

When you log into Facebook after the film—and you know you will—you might find that it feels a little different. On one hand, hanging around the site begins to seem like a bad idea. In a world that’s ever noisier and more demanding, it only gets harder to develop a “fruitful solitude” when dozens or hundreds of friends are constantly a click away. This round-the-clock aspect of Facebook, the perpetual presence of somebody to distract you from your anxieties and fears, begins to feel like being stuck in college.

The bigger shift, though, lies in how poignant Facebook suddenly seems. A site that began as a response to modern loneliness looks, after the film, like a record of our own struggle with that condition. The insistent connecting can’t fix what really ails us, but we go on doing it anyway.

{via.}

enjoy it, as i did.

-stephan!e

(home)sick

awoke this morning: cold, tummy-aching, missing the sound of ppl talking in the kitchen below me. missed going to the windows and seeing snow over everything.

flying into LA last night made my stomach hurt. i think the appropriate response for flying over a city should be awe or excitement, feeling like you're arriving someplace. but i saw the million lights, the traffic jams, the density and sprawl of this city manifest, and i felt a sick longing for the bluegrass.

exit plane, enter breezeway, begin panic attack.

boarded taxi. a small blue-eyed man with an unidentifiable accent drives me to my school where i left my car. we listened to some conservative talk radio show, the duration of the ride being the same host reiterating the same point over and over again, with increasingly dripping vitriol. "the new full body scanners at airports will specifically take pictures of genitalia, male and female genitalia, these scumbags will be looking at every crack, fold, and imprint on your genitals. they will look at the details of your genitals to see if you have explosives or not. if they can't see every crack, wrinkle and fold on your genitals..."

i open the window to drown out the noise, and to keep myself from throwing up all over the backseat.

the ride was short, only $14 on the meter, but the driver asks me for $17.50 ("flat rate," he says, while clearing the meter). i give him what i have, which is $18, and he demands more. "are you trying to make a point?" "no, i just want to go home." i look around nervously as he angrily argues with me, and i begin to worry about the lack of other people around, the dark, how far away i am from my car. he eventually gets back in the taxi, and i sheepishly say thank you, relieved.

i get home to an empty apartment that smells vaguely of spoiled food. notes on my desk reminding myself what to pack, a glass of water left on the table, slippers left where they were taken off, a half box of uneaten cookies – it's not that the apartment doesn't feel lived in, but i feel so alone.

comparing urban experiences

a portrait i took on the bike path from Hyde Park to upper downtown.
this photograph always exemplified the entire chicago experience for me: contented solitude in the midst of vastness.

you know, it's funny. my friend asked me the other day why i love chicago so much. and i really didn't have a compelling reason for him, aside from the obvious: public transportation, access to concerts, Millennium Park. beyond that and i'd have to go into a longer history of my interaction with that place.

it's not like Chicago's weather is even that great. when i lived there in the summer of 2006 it was sweltering hot and humid, and i lived without a.c. i sucked it up and refused to pay for such extravagance, knowing that strength and endurance emerge from a furnace. when i spent hours in the hot summer sun at Pitchfork and Lollapalooza that year, i hardly even sweat it (idiomatically speaking, that is). when i think back on it, i don't even recall being uncomfortable with the heat. i wore skirts a lot that summer, cut my hair real short, wore bathing suits under my clothes on the weekends. i sweat a lot but learned to not mind so much.

and it's not like life was easy. i worked two jobs, one at the Field Museum and the other as a field journalist/videographer for an indy news group. it was a 9-5 gig with on-call jobs over the weekends and sporadic meetings in the evenings. i remember hating the desk job at the museum at first, but then learning ways of using the space as a resource and finding my own projects to work on. i was never bored and never felt overworked. in fact, i recall working all day on a net neutrality video on a Saturday, from the 1 o'clock lunch with a co-worker that inspired the need for action, walking home writing a script (/rant) in my head, getting back to the apartment, starting up the camera, and recording/editing until 3 am in the morning, just for fun, because the project meant something to me. there were endless reports and meetings to do at the Field as well, but they were always fascinating and exciting and diverse enough in nature that it never became stifling.

it was the first time i'd ever lived in a big city, too. and i was by myself, without a car, without any friends or family in the city, no knowledge of how public trans worked. i was scared to take buses and trains at night. scared to leave the apartment after sun down. it was the first time i'd lived in an apartment (and in the worst part of town!) it was my first time grocery shopping for myself, the first time cooking (or attempting to) for myself. it was my first time using a gas stove, and i was afraid of gas leaks so never ended up using it. this is how my diet came to consist of mostly cold and raw foods for 3 months of my life. i was practically a live vegan, but i ate a lot of cheese and crackers. it was the first time i was overwhelmed with the possibilities of so many things at once, and i was so completely new to the experience of all of it.

but, that was the year i walked everywhere. and, when i got tired of walking, i found a couple who was willing to lend me a bike for the summer, and i rode along Lake Michigan and explored the city beaches. that was the year i joined Critical Mass and made 1,000 friends at once. that was the year i did yoga after work on the floor of a Maori house exhibit in the museum, and again in Millennium Park on weekend mornings, saluting the sun thru metallic beams. i spent afternoons walking thru art museums or photographing street performers. i read a book a week. i drew! i wrote poetry and listened to music. i danced. i took 30 minute train rides to chinatown to eat mango fried rice from a bamboo bowl. and that was the year i accidentally stranded myself in the worst part of town when the trains stopped running. it was the year i learned to make salsa from scratch and all-natural ingredients, and the year i fell asleep listening to Band of Horses' Funeral almost every night.

it's amazing to me to remember all of this, and there is still so much i could say. and though i have a penchant for reminiscing, this is hardly nostalgia at all, memory imbued with illusion from the passage of time. for though i never ate warm foods, and never had a.c., and was always working and walking and alone, i never felt unhappy, unfull, uncomfortable, or hungry. i was restless for more, but always well-rested, my skin was glowing and i felt young and alive and vibrant.

---

compare with now: i live with a childhood friend, but we hardly talk. i feel alone most days, even though i have many friends in the city and family nearby as well. i have a car but i'm terrified of driving it. LA traffic scares me and driving with the windows down is no longer considered part of a pleasurable experience. i lament missing good concerts b/c the venues are far away and the shows expensive. i have a fully functional kitchen and though i've gotten good at making fod for myself, i don't enjoy it, and hardly have the appetite for anything i make. still, i feel constantly hungry, go to bed hungry some nights. i don't sleep well, i toss and turn, waking up worrying it's 7 am when it's not even 3:30 am. i watch a lot of tv, hardly ever read, and even though i am always working or preparing to work, i never feel i've accomplished anything.

and LA's weather is fine, but i hardly ever enjoy it.

silver lining

the one positive thing about being so extraordinarily far away from some ppl is that when i really really want to be alone, all i have to do is shut the door, and close the computer.

shutting out, shutting down, and disconnecting.

amazing how you thought you knew some ppl, and then they surprise you so completely, and think nothing of it.

i think i will, against my better efforts, always be a misanthrope by trade and hobby.

-stephan!e

return to the single life

i miss this.

if you read this regularly and wondered where i'd disappeared to in the last 2 weeks, yr answer is this: i've been here all along, but away from my computer! what do you think about that?!

the truth is that i spend far more time on the internet when i am alone. i used to worry i have become technology-dependent, but i realize now that it's just a proxy for communicating with ppl i can't live without. hm, well, that and a convenient distraction. but i could quit if i wanted to, and i did!

2 weeks was the exact amount of time my boyfriend was in LA. we were making up for lost time. 6 months is a long time not to see someone who makes you obliviously and ridiculously happy. but now he's gone again, still in transit on his return to that lucky country of Turkey. and now things are quiet and lonely. it's back to cooking dinners for two and only eating half, saving leftovers in tupperware containers, not drinking wine and lighting candles, brushing my teeth all by myself, taking a week to finish a carton of orange juice, taking a week and a half to finish a loaf of bread, waiting in line at the grocery store all by myself, sorting receipts and grading papers, working out obsessively and yes, blogging, twittering, tumblring, and checking email because now i have the time.

there are infinite daily events in modern life that have the potential to be either extremely gratifying or intensely miserable. these ritual behaviors can be vastly improved by pleasant companionship, eased by a reassuring hand or the proximity of a familiar human touch. unfortunately, these are frequently things we take for granted, and these events comprise the majority of every day. and as with so many things, we notice and lament the lack more than we appreciate the presence, sometimes. it is bad enough to feel so alone, but then something as small as getting into a car and looking over to the passenger seat and realizing there's no one there to talk to or hold yr hand thru rush hour traffic, or to notice all the leftover pasta in the pan after you're already full, those are things that make you heartsick.

coming back to my apartment last night after dropping Ben off at the airport encapsulated the feeling that lingers this evening as i write this, that will probably persist in all its manifest forms for the next 4 months until i see him again or have another visitor: an empty apartment, only my clothes in a messy heap on the chair, pillows stacked on one side of the bed, one set of towels, one toothbrush in a cup.

i once wrote that returning to an empty apartment after weeks of constant companionship is perhaps the most depressing experience imaginable. but i was wrong. what saddens me most is returning to the way life is, rather than the way it could be.

-stephan!e