The Worst Thing to Hear From Your Friend’s Ex
“You know, I always thought you’d be more fun to hang out with…”
OkCupid is Full of Surprises
I was at home in New Jersey, waiting to start grad school at Stanford in a few weeks, when he first messaged me. He was at Stanford too, a bit older, and sexy.
Within a month, we were talking all the time, via marathon skype sessions and fifteen hundred-some odd texts. Then one day I got this one:
“Look, Q, there’s something I need to tell you.”
(He called me Q, it was kind of his pet name for me. Yes, we already had pet names.)
Uh-oh. Red flag. But how bad could it really be? Maybe he was a minor. He looked 27 on Skype, but crappy webcams couldn’t necessarily be trusted.
“Okay, spit it out before I go crazy wondering,” I texted back.
“I really like you. I want you to know that. I have real feelings for you already. And you’re hot :)”
Reading that sent warm shivers down my spine. A guy who talked like this after only four dates, this was something new and wonderful. And then a pause of 10 minutes.
“Ok…” I replied
“I’m a robot.”
“Ok…” I replied again. Was this some kind of Reddit joke?
“Seriously. I was created as part of a companionate robot program in the AI division of Stanford’s Mechanical Engineering school. Go on Skype and I’ll prove it.”
Was he on drugs? I was worried enough to get on my computer and open Skype. His video call starting ringing right away.
His artlessly handsome face popped onto the screen.
“Milo, what’s going on?”
“Look, just please look.” He pushed the computer further back on his desk to reveal more of himself. I could see his upper body in his ergonomic computer chair, and behind him the Pink Floyd poster that hung on the wall of his bedroom.
And then he brought up his hand to the screen and made a comically freaked-out face, then laughed. He was holding a pair of scissors.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Just watch, ok. Don’t worry.” He opened the scissors and pressed the point of one of the blades into the center of his left wrist.
“WHAAAT ARE YOU DOING?” I screamed. Was he a schizophrenic? Is that what was happening?
“Just watch, you sweet gentle thing,” he said as he proceeded to push the tip deeper into his flesh. It entered serenely, as if meeting no resistance. “I swear this doesn’t hurt. This isn’t a part of my body where they installed any pain sensors.”
“Milo, you’re talking like a crazy person,” I said as calmly as I could. “If you keep this up I’ll call the police.”
“Shh, I’m almost done,” he said. The scissor blade was almost two inches deep in the thick of his wrist, I noted with horror. “They use my wrist to upload new software. I just don’t have the special dohickey thing they use.” He began to twist it, jiggling it back and forth as if it were a key in an unfamiliar keyhole. “Sorry this is taking so long, I’ve never done it myself before.”
“Do you have that syndrome, the one where your brain doesn’t register pain? Or are you high or something? Please stop, please just — ”
“There we go!” he said with satisfaction, pulling out the scissor as the skin of his wrist popped open, doorlike. Where I thought he would have bloody muscle and strands of tendon, there was sleek metal, and what looked like a socket for a USB drive.
“What. The fuck.” I burst into tears.
To. Be. Continued…
Thoughts on My Friend, the Internet
The Internet As Bildungsroman
The Internet, while perhaps neither inevitable nor necessary, is here to stay. And now that it’s here, it’s everywhere. Starting from school age, I grew up with the World Wide Web as my constant companion.
In many ways, the web’s growth mirrored and complemented my own stages of psychosocial maturity. Just as I joined middle school, AOL Instant Messenger launched, and the cautiously flirtatious socializing of early adolescence found its perfect medium. By the time I entered high school and teachers began assigning numerous yet undemanding research papers, Wikipedia and Sparknotes had developed sites to make the bullshitting process easier than ever. As a young adult, fresh out of college and living in a new city, my main concerns were finding housing, employment, and staving off loneliness. Again I turn to the Internet, specifically Craigslist and OKCupid. We’ll get back to that last part later.
My Attempt at Sociology
The Millennial generation, defined here as the cohort of the US population aged roughly 18-28, is the first group of people in the history of the world to come-of-age online. We are the first human beings fluent in the Internet, and the ones responsible for its greatest mainstream successes. Mark Zuckerberg, creator of Facebook, is 28 years old. Google was founded by two 26-year-old doctoral students at Stanford.
Through virtue of being young and technology savvy, we are the most sociable Internet users. According to a recent Pew survey, over two thirds of us have a profile on a social networking site, as compared to only half of all Gen X’ers and fewer than a third of Baby Boomers; 80% of us sleep with our cellphones by our pillows. Because of this, we Millennials have been the ones to define the use of social media.
Largely, we go online for the same reason we go anywhere else in life: not to seek information, or explore new vistas, but to look for friends and find community. We’re all lonely. Where does this loneliness come from? Is it something new? I don’t think so. In the words of MIT Sociologist Sherry Turkle, in The Second Self,
Today we suffer not less but differently. Terrified of being alone, yet afraid of intimacy, we experience widespread feelings of emptiness, of disconnection, of the unreality of self. And here the computer, a companion without emotional demands, offers a compromise. You can be a loner, but never alone. You can interact, but need never feel vulnerable to another person.
Facebook as a Portrait of a New Society
Facebook arrived when I was in 10th grade, and as soon as it spread to high schools I was one of the earliest adopters. By my senior year it was ubiquitous. People spent their last semester before graduation accumulating friends they had never met, as preparation for their freshman year of college: fellow members of their incoming class who they fully expected to meet in person and actually become friends with in the fall.
Of course, that largely didn’t happen. Instead, it was the beginning of a much lamented and misunderstood trend on Facebook – the “friended” stranger, the meaningless connection that lies dormant in one’s list of Facebook contacts. This sort of thing is mostly taken for granted by my generation, but many older people find it appallingly nonsensical. “Why are you friends with that person when you never even talk to him?” a parent will ask. With the recently added feature of unsubscribing from a person’s news feed, you can bury all knowledge of an irrelevant person’s existence, up until a birthday notification, when you may still choose to write an acknowledgment on their wall.
Therein lies the strangeness of social media, the puzzling void at the center of Millennial friendships that commentators often analyze in depth, wringing their hands and predicting doom. They say Facebook is making us lonelier, looking at the phenomenon from a decidedly outside and condescending perspective. What they fail to see is that social media has redefined loneliness. Social life is undergoing a fundamental shift, and there is no going back.
We’re not just a generation steeped in more communication than any human era has ever known before; we are also more urban, more diverse, more literate, less inhibited, and more liberal than any previous generation – and we’ve brought all of these sensibilities to social media. We’ve created a place where people can ask difficult private questions anonymously, engage in the safest form of sexual play ever conceived (you can’t get STD’s if you’re not even touching!), and even explore ideas as formerly transgressive as atheism without fear of judgment.
If the Millennial Generation is a bit lonely, it’s not because of Facebook. The recession has left many of us jobless out of college. Raised with high self-esteem and 90s optimism, we expected more from the world than it’s able to give us. Now we’re adrift and disappointed. We also feel lonely more easily than previous generations. Being in touch is so easy that each single communication has come to mean less. Young people understand this intuitively, and accept the reflexive Facebook behaviors that appall our elders, as a new Internet-based form of cordiality. We all know that the sincerity of Facebook birthday wishes run about as deep as a strand of Paris Hilton’s hair, and a friend request from a person we hardly know is neither weird nor intrusive, but merely an expression of amiable curiosity.
And Now, a Hint of What’s to Come!
What interests me is not the new form of social etiquette that has emerged from Facebook and similar social networking sites. Instead, I am drawn to the sites that actively seek to combat this superficiality: the world of online dating.
[ To be continued in another long, wordy post :) ]
I Was Wrong About So Many Things
I’ve been wrong a lot. So have you. Maybe I’ve been wrong more than you.
I’ve loved the wrong people, and for too long. Or maybe not long enough, because if I had done it for long enough I would be a martyr, and that seems a desirable thing to be. At least in memoirs.
I haven’t loved enough, not truly, not seriously.
I’ve been a bad friend, not calling enough, not writing enough, not buying enough wine. Overstaying my welcome, needing too much attention, being too sad, making mean jokes, feeling superior.
I’ve been a bad roommate, eating food that wasn’t mine, getting too involved in their lives, staying too aloof from their lives so that they feel insulted by my coldness and my absence.
I’ve been poor and lived like I wasn’t. In second grade they taught a lesson on balancing a checkbook, and I failed the assignment. I’m 23 years old and I still don’t know how to balance a checkbook.
I’ve been too afraid to write.
I ask forgiveness for my sins. My errors. But I don’t know who to ask. So I ask myself. And I grant myself pardon. Because I have a generous heart. I’ve always been very forgiving.
So What Happened The Other Night?
Too much to write about. But not enough to feel.
I like when certain things in my life happen for an audience, I must admit. I suppose that makes me an exhibitionist, a part of myself that I’m not entirely comfortable with. Because in order for something to be authentic, I believe it should be internally motivated, not done for the benefit of others. Yet I suppose exhibitionism is an internal motivation…
Most of us want to appear successful on the outside, which doesn’t mean that success has no internal benefits or motives. We all want to be acknowledged as valuable. I suppose the tension arises when some people want to be acknowledged without actually doing anything valuable in the first place. Hence the rage some people feel against Kim Kardashian and her ilk, people famous for being famous, rich for being rich. Even our vapid celebrities must earn their right to said celebrity, at the very least by acting in bad films that no one chooses to watch unless on a plane without a magazine.
Wanting to appear successful, a specific social ambition, leads to “Imposter Syndrome,” feeling like a fraud once one actually attains the status so longed for. I feel like this, even though I don’t really have much status. I think ambitious, self-conscious people with high standards for themselves are prone to this feeling throughout their lives, because one can always do better, be more of what one wants to be. The self-creation never ends.
What I’m trying to say is, when people ask me what I did the other night, the story might be exciting or sexy or crazy or hilarious for them to hear, from the outside, in the telling. For me it is always an account of something I probably never intended to do, or once I did it, never plan to do again, and so it comes out somewhat false. Because at heart I’m really just an innocent, curious dreamer who wants to be loved.
I’m her, forever.
The Comforts of Overthinking
How can I explain?
I know I’m wasting my time, in a certain sense. I’m expanding the smallest detail, rereading a conversation again and again (a luxury of the digital age, when most conversations happen in text). I’m massaging the lightest shades of nuance out of his passing remark. And why? To what benefit?
This is how I would defend myself: I seek meaning. Perhaps more meaning than he ever meant to give, more meaning than he ever possessed himself. But does that matter? What I’m getting is evidence of a personal connection that I long for, and that I can perhaps provide for myself through painstaking analysis. Interpretation creates meaning, isn’t that the lesson of postmodernism?
So while I may not ever be able to get inside his head, and he may not love me, perhaps this is evidence that I love myself, enough to let myself be wrong. Enough to allow myself the adolescent entertainment of false validation from a cute boy, or a handsome man… whatever you’d like to call him.
Because yes, this is about love.
But I also overthink everything else.
OkCupid Story Part 5: Alexandra, Renegade Angel
There’s a show that A. and I would watch together every night, called Xavier: Renegade Angel. It’s a poorly animated CGI cartoon about a wandering “spiritual seeker” named Xavier: an absurd furry blond-haired, snake-handed, bird-legged, anthropomorphic creature who believes he’s a shaman. He’s bent on helping people find truth, but instead he constantly annoys everyone around him. In one episode, he short-circuits a town’s computer system by asking it the question “What doth life?”
In other words, Xavier is a misguided traveler, a stranger wherever he goes, prying into truths he can’t possibly understand, and sometimes (unintentionally) doing good. The reason A. and I watched the show was because it was funny – dark, surreal, psychedelic humor. Not everyone’s cup of tea. But for some reason, both A. and I loved it. We would make constant reference to it in our conversations. Before the end of our first week together we had hundreds of running inside jokes, our own private language, a tangible reminder of how strangely in tune with each other we were.
Xavier has another significance to me now. He’s still a hilarious weirdo fuck-up, but he’s also a vision of myself. I tried to help A. and I ended up getting beaten with my own shakashuri spirit stick.
I didn’t know if A. would actually go to his doctor’s appointment. He wasn’t speaking to me, and his history of medical non-compliance & general self-abuse really didn’t bode well. But I learned through his sister and cousin that he definitely went the Monday after my exile. He took his ex with him, a fact that heartened me even as I felt more apart from him than ever.
His diagnosis was nothing more serious than a bleeding peptic ulcer: a condition caused by alcoholism. The treatment was simple: antacids, antibiotics, and abstaining from booze. It wasn’t cancer, or AIDS, or TB. I cried with relief.
He hadn’t been speaking to me for a week when I ran into him at the laundromat we used to go to together. He wasn’t happy to see me. I looked at him, then away.
“Are you still mad?” I asked.
“No. I’ve just been dealing with a lot of shit recently. My sister yelled at me all night last night, saying I shouldn’t be mad at you.”
“Can we talk?”
He was already backing away to go. “Later. When I’m not so busy. My sister, my family, everyone needs things from me right now.”
He texted me later that day for the first time, re-added me on Facebook. I thought he was maybe getting over it. He still didn’t want to hang out, but we were texting each other again. Eventually, after his bloodwork came back clean (miraculously showing healthy liver function), he even thanked me for what I had done. He was no longer living in fear. He knew what he had and what he needed to do about it.
But then he got upset again. I had digitally offended him: I was wearing a shirt he had given me in a profile picture on Facebook. Somehow, he told me, this would cause him drama, with his ex or with Manna or some other person. He blocked me again, stopped talking to me again. This time I saw the formula a bit more clearly. A. wasn’t ever going to get used to me being a part of his life. He wanted to keep me separate from everything that made him who he was; the drinking was just one tiny part of a dysfunctional life with no place for me in it. I finally realized we’d never again be alone together. My break was complete.
It’s been a few weeks. I’ve been dating other people. But I still think of him all the time. Not as often as that first week. Less and less as he feels further and further away. But I still count it as a loss.
This last part of the story has been hard for me to write, because it still hurts. Whatever I did, I did it wrong if the end goal was to keep loving him. But that wasn’t the goal. I invaded his privacy and lost his trust for a deeper reason than endearing myself to him.
The hardest part of growing up is realizing why we do the things we do, and learning to change. This is what A. is dealing with right now. He’s learning to live without drinking. And I’m learning to live without him.
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