oggrrrl

[oggrrrl]

It was this or Medium…

I feel like I just opened a MySpace account. Do people still use this? Can I tell you how much I hate social media today? In the beginning, it was all very much like Tumblr which is, I suppose, why I’m here, what attracted me to say fuck it, let’s go. Time to leap into the new Millennium! Hell, I was pretty damn content with AOL. I forget completely what it was but I forgot the name of something the other day and it wasn’t something I could Google. Do you know how nice that feeling was? A feeling I’d felt thousands of times before but never knew I’d miss one day: lying in bed thinking, trying to come up with the name of something and having nothing but my own brain to rely on.

And it made me realize, how many feelings like that have I not felt in 15 years that I don’t know because the internet stops me from feeling them? Waiting for the phone to ring or someone’s car to come down my street. Putting something in my pocket a day walking out of a store knowing that there is no camera or loss prevention person looking at me. Just walking down the street knowing there’s no camera looking at me. Waiting to get photos developed. Writing notes to people on paper (typed or on loose leaf) and passing them in class or putting them in the mail. Calling Moviefone. Hurrying to pee and get a snack during the commercial break. Being so OVER MTV because their commercial breaks were twice as long as every other channel. Walking every Sunday to my aunt’s house so excited for the next 2 totally new hours of Sopranos and 6 Feet Under. Or the bittersweet feel of Sunday night: school the next day but first, the Simpsons and at least 1 other good show whether it was Herman’s Head or Family Guy. Knowing that if I Love Lucy was on, I had stayed up to the point where I would be exhausted the next day. If I heard The Andy Griffith whistling theme, I was in real deep shit.

There is a disconnect from life now. There is an expectedness. There is a way things will go and a world we have each tailored to ourselves, half on a screen and half in our heads. And we live there more often than not and only sometimes do some of us realize that it is not real, that it is built on the masks we wear and the compulsions we hide from others even if they are a foot away, staring right at us. That kids are growing up in this world. That some people spend so much time in it that not only do they entertain the notion at some point that the other, the physical world, is really just secretly like their pretend world but that it becomes painful for them to have to interact in physical space, anxiety inducing and wrong-feeling.

Great first post. Like people actually read anymore? 2 lines of text is a “novel” (bring back Cometbus dear god. Walls of text so true they can’t not be read) and teenagers can’t read cursive. Well, that last bit is kind of funny as it means that we have a secret language, a de oder ring built into our brains with which we can communicate about people under a certain age (when did they stop teaching it?) without their knowledge, in front of them. If I had kids I would so use thisfailing of the svhool system against them. Bwa ha ha.

And now, as this is a blog, and the word aesthetics has replaced authentic at some point and the most meaningful career choice has become graphic design, a photo. And some hashtags as they even feel rather quaint at this point. And, hey, question. What’s the rules re: NSFW content on this? Asking for a friend. Ha! Jules