Patrick, a contrarian, recently expressed to me his annoyance about the cumbersome and time-consuming task of opening emails, and how many items of the in-box were summarily deleted unopened. He's often an inscrutable man who expresses himself in few words - specifically "Ummm", "Hmmmm" and "Ugh."
"First there are the political emails," he said, "I ignore them. Then the jokes - some of them are pretty good - I forward them - did you get any?
Then the offers for car deals. Then - male enhancement drug advertisements. I check to be sure they're not from anyone I know - but how could they be? Male enhancement? Me? Ridiculous. So I then delete them - a lot of them contain hidden viruses."
He continued, "Then I get Bible stuff - and 50 updates a day from my high school alumni group chat room. So I delete those and read them when I'm in the actual chat room. Then I'm done. Sometimes it takes me days to get to the real email that I have to answer....or sometimes I miss important emails. Last week someone sent me a suicide note. I'm hoping he's still alive. It ended up in "Spam." I was thinking of calling him but it might be too late..."
Of course he was mostly joking and being hyperbolic (hopefully at least about the suicide note) and making a point, but he unwittingly hit on something that we've all worried about since the explosion of social media: what is the right way to reach out to someone if you're in trouble?
I've recently been told that ranting on the Facebook Wall - which I do regularly - is not a good way to express angst. "You post WAY too much," the Queen of Social media recently told me "people are going to start hiding you."
I told this helpful person that her suggestion - though well-taken - didn't phase me at first, as I considered posting like graffiti...you put in on the wall and don't really expect anyone to read it - and if they do - you hope they get a laugh out of it. However, as I usually think too much, the mulling over phase started - which led to full-tilt social media anxiety.
It's more than worrying about appearing unstable; most of my FB friends know me from "real life" and understand that "out there" is sometimes where I dwell, and that the posts are a form of "performance art" or self-expression.
Nonetheless, I vowed to listen to her and try one or two social network free days per week - to have only real relationships with people I talk to face-to-face. To use the telephone and not the walls of virtual reality to connect. To cry into my pillow and not into a status update. And - most of all - to obsess over life's fluctuating ups and downs privately, so that the mini-storms are ridden out in a less public forum that won't someday come back to bite me in the arm. Or the ass. Here, I can say "Ass" with no fear of being villified. Hallelujah. Maybe there's something to the non-Facebook theory.
But then I foolishly started paging through old high school yearbooks, with Patrick. It's fun to look back at the pages of a book you don't remember owning, let alone whose photos grace its pages. When doing with Patrick, it's a veritable Pandora's Box; opening it can unearth old insecurities and long-buried feelings of longing, wistfulness and unrequited adolescent love. And some happy memories.
"Hmmmmmm," he said, when falling upon a lovely Italian beauty captured forever in her teen-aged splendor. "We went on a ski trip together...I got to kiss her...only once..."
"But your dream is still collecting residuals?," I asked.
"Hmmmm," he responded.
"Ugh," I thought, "Men are retarded."
Then I found a picture of a boy who had inspired six poems during my senior year.
"Hmmm," I thought, "too bad I never kissed him..."
"Yes," he agreed, "the residuals...hmmmmm."
"Ugh," I thought.
Comments