MindSpinner

At Salon.com, Cary Tennis doles out advice I like to read sometimes. Among recent columns, there is a letter from a woman who found a fine friendship online and then found that it did not translate well into reality when she became a part of her friend’s wedding party.

Cary Tennis’s reply included remarks about our lives on the Internet that I found thought-provoking. I’ve extracted them from the rest of his response:

One of the wonderful things about the Internet is that it acts as a space into which we can project an imaginary or secondary self, one more congruent with our own values, more thoughtful, more articulate, more honest.

There are many reasons for this — the relative newness of the medium (we have not been conditioned since birth to cloak our identities there, to adopt a narrow mode of discourse suited to the demands of the classroom and the corporation); the privacy it affords us (we sit alone at a keyboard; our faces are hidden); and the positive feedback loop it engenders (the personas we project are greeted as actual beings). For many of us, conduct on the Internet retains an element of idealistic play; we are not there strictly for profit, but in order to be who we are, or who we would be if we could be who we dream ourselves to be — the Internet acts as a vast stage upon which we strut like eager children, free of the constant gravity of circumstance, free to be, for a short time, the people we feel we were meant to be.

Of course, offline we remain the same shoddy, unkempt, short-tempered, disorganized persons we always were, living in close, overheated rooms that smell of cat litter and rancid butter, shuffling about looking for the toenail clippers, muttering about Karl Rove and steroids in baseball.

Inwardly we are so much richer and better, we are capable of so much more; we are princesses abandoned at birth; we are supermen concealing our powers behind mild-mannered anonymity. It might be said that what some people project onto the Internet is not only a heightened, idealized self but in fact a kind of divine self. I do not think anyone ever lives up to such ideals; most people never even reveal them. It is in fact a tribute to the Internet that it allows so many people to reveal so much.

I have been pondering what is transformative about conversation in cyberspace. Perhaps we come here to invent selves, but I don’t know how many of us are trying to project something false - I came here to find my voice, to think aloud, to aspire, to say what others might or might not want to hear (and it didn’t matter terribly which), because the speaking is a way of being alive.

By contrast, the truest aspects of who we are are often diminished and obscured by the business of everyday life - there may seem no place for them.

What I like about conversations here is that they bridge difference, that one mind encounters another sans circumstance. Here superficial differences don’t matter so much, and deeper connections do.

In 3-D life, I have a friend I debate with constantly. He’s a good soul, and he helps me out, and I try to figure out how I can repay the favor. He’ll come this Saturday to show me how to replace the damaged cord on my favorite radio, a 34-year-old Sony I got for my 10th birthday from my parents (best reception of any radio in the house). He’ll probably also crank my brushcutter for me so I can slay the primordial forest growing in the dogs’ 20′ x 30′ yard. (I dislike yard tools with gasoline-powered motors. They scare me a little and produce exhaust. So I just have this one, this brushcutter, which is made for a 6′man, because there aren’t any electric equivalents to do the job.)

But this everyday life friend doesn’t think much of reading as a pastime, and he argues that I ought to use Round-Up to control the weeds that grow between the stones in the garden path. (I use a little forked tool instead.) He shakes his head when I say there’s no way I’m doing that, that I’ve started growing little bits of moss, wild sedum, and creeping thyme between those stones. No Round-Up, no how, no way, not anywhere near my garden.

Online, I cross paths with people who care about things I care about. There are resonances of one kind or another or several at once. Here it might be gardening. There it might be reading or teaching or photography. Sometimes it’s just the compelling craft of writing well (which I manage only once in a while). Elsewhere, it might be shared beliefs or political philosophies or a certain vision of personal experience.

On occasion I’ve met people I came to know first online, and online friendships have taken on an offline existence. My closest friend began as a friend without a face. But I don’t think online connections are necessarily any less real than offline ones. Sometimes they are more real, but differently so.

I opened an astounding gift yesterday, from a blog reader become friend who looked, apparently, straight through me (only perhaps seeing me as a finer soul than I am, as per Tennis’s observations above), and determined that I should be able to pursue a shared interest in nature photography which intersects with my love of poetry, gardening, the outdoors in general, and art. This friend didn’t know that there has been a digital camera sitting in my Amazon shopping cart for a long time. (I sometimes put things I want in my Amazon shopping cart not because I can buy them but because I am happier pretending as if I might sometime. If I actually do buy something, I have to begin by moving any “break-the-bank” items to “Save for Later.”) This morning, however, begins a new sort of adventure, because now I do have a digital camera - and online friends to share that adventure with.

There is a profound serendipity to our lives on the Web.

In Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, my favorite passage is the one in which Maggie Jones tells the two old McPherson brothers, batchelor farmers, that they need to take in and take care of a pregnant teenager who is no relation at all:

But that girl needs somebody and I’m ready to take desperate measures. She needs a home for these months. And you - she smiled at them - you old solitary bastards need somebody too. Somebody or something besides an old red cow to care about and worry over. It’s too lonesome out here. Well, look at you. You’re going to die some day without ever having had enough trouble in your life. Not of the right kind anyway. This is your chance.

In Plainsong, the McPherson brothers come to love Victoria Roubideaux. They opt for the right kind of trouble, and, frankly, they get it. Nonetheless, in Haruf’s novels, taking on the right kind of trouble is ultimately redemptive for all concerned.

It doesn’t matter what sort of love we can talk about, love for a child, love for a partner, love for a parent, love between friends, even love for a pet - love has ever meant taking on the right kind of trouble, letting it into our lives. Love has two faces - one is life’s deepest joy, the marrow of its meaning; the other is trouble, trouble in any shape or size we can imagine. Insofar as we love, we opt to risk suffering and loss, pain that plumbs us to depths that mirror precisely the heights to which love can reach. That’s the deal. We learn love by loving; we learn love by losing. A mother doesn’t think of this, holding her baby to her breast. Lovers do not think of this when they find infinity together in embrace.

But it’s still the right kind of trouble, and in the end, worth whatever comes. It is love that redeems us from the diminished selves we would otherwise be, and by love’s means we redeem each other. It is what we know of God (as opposed, in some cases, to what we think we know). It’s a risk brave souls will forever take.

Reading this again, I am impressed by how such notions can seem like platitudes - until they don’t.

I stood at the end of the aisle in the grocery store today, trying to think whether I needed to steer my cart down its length for some item or another. The aisle was empty except for a young dad and his kid, who was maybe two, sitting in dad’s grocery cart. Kroger was piping in that music played to make us middle-aged shoppers feel young again, and dad was dancing, right there in the aisle, to the utter delight of kid. I watched for a few seconds, grinning, but not long enough for dad to turn and see. This scene was the happiest thing I saw all day.

It turns out that both the Internet and blogging were envisioned by a 19th-century Russian, Prince Vladimir Odoevsky, who foresaw butlers taking care of the postings. Apparently he did not foresee that we wouldn’t have butlers, most of us, and that we certainly wouldn’t forego the pleasure of writing our own posts, in any case.

I’ve always been fascinated by how the stuff of science fiction often eventually evolves into fact, more or less, and by how the dream can precede the reality by decades or centuries or even millennia.

I’d like to dream up a thing or two that comes to be. I’m too myopic to envision changes 100 years from now, but surely one could make suggestions for a few nifty little adjustments in the way things work within a handful of years - or at least the day after tomorrow.

What if my master calendar could subscribe to calendar “feeds”? I could subscribe to my kids’ schools’ calendars, appointment feeds, my work calendar, cultural events calendars of my choice; everything would update automatically in one place and reminders be sent in the form I designate. I could either work from this master calendar or click to move selected events to a streamlined working calendar, omitting what ends up being irrelevant. This is hardly far-fetched; in fact, I find that the folks at rss.calendar.com are already at work on such a tool, though it requires the bother of importing and falls short of the busy woman’s vision for automaticity.

Let’s talk clothes shopping. (This comes to mind not because I love shopping for clothes but because clothes shopping is such a time-consuming trial and error process, and I do not love a day at the mall.) I was going to suggest a body scanning system that would download to a computer database a 3-D image of the body, enabling clothing manufacturers to create custom-made garments for individual buyers, or, perhaps, for a search engine to identify clothing in a given category that would actually fit the buyer - no dressing rooms required. A quick Internet search confirms that someone has already thought of the Body Scanner. Combined with a canny online clothing design program and an array of fabric choices, this tool would ensure that garments fit and offer buyers a hand in the design process. Of course, if the clothes are to fit, the scanning program will have to compensate for the fact that lots of people getting scanned will hold their breath and suck in their stomachs.

If that scanner can focus in on my size 5, slightly wide, high-arched feet and order me a pair of shoes that fit in a style I like, we will truly have a marvelous revolution.

So far I’m 0 for 2. Next stop, Kroger. (Actually Kroger really is my next stop, which is why I’m thinking of it.) The Internet coupons are fine. Love ‘em. Need a coupon feed, though. Don’t mind the Kroger cards, either. Sure, I’ll sell a record of my Kroger grocery buying habits for discounts (or, more accurately, regular pricing as opposed to grocery aisle robbery). It’s those pesky ticker tape coupons I get at check-out that annoy me. I do not want them in my purse. I do not want to carry them around. I do not want to cut them up and have to remember to pull them out at the appointed moment at the cash register. Never happens. I have a life, for goodness sake. I want them loaded by the cash register onto my Kroger card, just as Internet coupons are, with a simple succinct listing of the coupons I’ve earned for next time, printed right there at the bottom of my receipt for reference, or maybe on a separate little strip. When I buy something on my coupon list, the price is automatically discounted. This technology already, in fact, exists for this, but grocery store “smart cards” have not made it to my neighborhood Kroger. What’s the hold-up?

This exercise, which I really do have to end here in order to go hunting and gathering at Kroger, has offered me two key insights: 1) I have useful ideas, really (she says to console herself). 2) Other people have them first. I’m not predicting the future, I’m cataloguing the present, or in some cases, yesterday.

I can only bow respectfully to the likes of Prince Vladimir Odoevsky and H.G. Wells. No doubt the challenge of thinking of some genuinely new and useful idea will keep me occupied at stop lights and in waiting rooms. Or at 4:00 a.m.

A substantive post began to be this morning, but it’s still in the form of little flashes in my head and will take at least a few days to obtain presentable form.

In the meantime, fall temperatures have arrived, and the house was cool last night. I won’t be turning on the furnace for a while, and when I do, I’m setting it on 60 and hoping that heating bills won’t top out much higher than $175. I dragged the down comforter out of the hall closet and spread it across my bed, then cocooned myself into it. Heavenly. It is so warm it is a feathery embrace - almost an embrace, that is, but without arms or the beating of another heart.

The logistical problem is that I cannot spend all winter in a down comforter. This morning when I rose, the room was chilly. Three layers later, I could navigate the house without being conscious of cold. The joke is that the temperature in the house has dropped thus far only to about 67 degrees.

I’m obviously going to need strategies. Wear jacket when necessary. Run up and down stairs five times whenever cold. Wear more socks. Deploy foot warmer - sit on it cross-legged. Carry tissues because cold makes my nose run. I’m already sniffing.

As I write, my daughter pops into the doorway to ask about a pair of jeans. She’s wearing a tank top and shorts. Itty bitty shorts. Show off.