Alone and Unobserved

That I’m in contact with any of my old friends is a miracle—specifically a Facebook miracle. It’s thanks to Facebook that I’m still in touch with former roommates, former BYU friends, former dance partners, former fellow grad students, former coworkers, former professors and former boyfriends, as well as cousins, aunts, online acquaintances, fellow atheists, fellow ex-Mormons, fellow gays and so on and so forth.

I’m beginning to wonder if this is really a good thing. I just lost a friend, primarily because of what each of us has posted openly online (see the comments on this post). She is a practicing, faithful Mormon who supported Prop 8 and who opposes same-sex marriage because she believes homosexual sex is a sin. In fact, like many other Mormons and many fundamentalist Christians, she doesn’t even believe homosexuality exists, per se. She has written a great deal about her views on her blog.

I, on the other hand, am a confirmed atheist ex-Mormon gay man who believes the Mormon church is a man-made organization that is characterized by bigotry, lies and self-righteousness. I believe Proposition 8 was motivated by intolerance and deception and homophobia, and that the Mormon church bears a great deal of the blame for its passing. Just last weekend I participated in a protest against the Mormon church’s opposition to gay rights and support of Prop 8. I have also made no secret of any of these things on my blog.

So she found my blog and was horrified and upset by what she found here, and I found her blog and was horrified and upset in my turn. I wrote a blog post in which I speculated cynically about the true reasons behind the Mormon church and its members’ opposition to gay marriage. She wrote a hurtful comment in response, in which she questioned my integrity and called me bitter and closed-minded. I wrote a cold rebuttal, which I closed by stating that I didn’t feel much friendship for her anymore. She agreed.

Are there some former acquaintanceships that are worth preserving, at least for nostalgia’s sake, but which are too fragile to handle the constant barrage of truth and stream-of-consciousness honesty that accompany an online relationship? Would Summer and I still consider ourselves “friends” if neither of us had a blog and neither of us was on Facebook? Is it possible to preserve a friendship by willfully refusing to know the truth about another person?

Just a few years ago, Summer’s devotion to the Mormon church and opposition to same-sex marriage would have been things we had in common, not things that drove us apart or set us at odds. People change. Our ideas of what friendship is also change.

And then there is my family. I don’t really discuss these subjects with them, but I’m Facebook friends with several of my siblings, and I’ve seen their status updates and the causes they’ve joined. And I’m sure they’ve seen my statuses and notes and causes. How is it possible to preserve a relationship, knowing what we know about each other?

Yes, that’s right. Even though I barely have enough filler for this blog, I’ve gone ahead and used Google’s ghastly WYSIWYG page editor to create my very own website. Right now I’m just using it to link to my published Google Documents—including some Internet Writing Workshop exercises that have never been seen before!!—but that may change.

You can find the site at aloneandunobserved.googlepages.com. I know it looks awful—I blame Google.

I’ve spent a lot of the last few weeks being bored. Stress, illness and anxiety have combined to create a particular kind of wild-eyed, insomniac haze that leaves me too tired to do anything useful or engaging, but too wired and jumpy to sleep. When I’m in that state, what’s left to do but surf the web?

Unfortunately, I can only wander aimlessly across the interweb for a short while before even that palls. I have several blogs I read regularly (see sidebar), a couple of forums I post on, and a few webcomics I follow, but blogs and webcomics only update every so often, and forums (though updated almost constantly) only have so much intelligent material on them. So after about an hour I’m down to the two main “networking” sites I belong to, Facebook and MySpace.

So let’s talk strengths and weaknesses. When you’re strung-out and wide-awake at 2 o’clock in the morning, which should you turn to—MySpace or Facebook?

MySpace specializes in weaknesses: a laughable and bug-riddled interface is “jazzed up” by individual users with psychedelic colors, blaring music and annoying video. Facebook, on the other hand, has a clean, intuitive and uncluttered design. MySpace=fun. Facebook=functional.

A few months ago, the Facebook community was rocked to its core when a new feature debuted: the so-called “News Feed” that keeps you informed about what your friends have been doing lately, with one-line snippets like, “James and Julie are now friends” or “Bob edited Quotes and Music in his profile.” Many people cried police state (even though users can easily change their privacy settings to prevent any or all of these announcements), but I say, that’s exactly what I’m looking for. MySpace informs you when your friends are online, and when they last logged on, but it doesn’t say whether they’ve changed anything, which means you have to go into Bob’s profile and read through it line by line to see if anything’s changed—and that’s if the color scheme he has selected leaves anything readable. On Facebook, on the other hand, it’s all there:

Today


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• Bob is feeling poorly. 10:01 pm
  

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• Bob changed his about me to “I’m fantastic and ur not.” 9:40 pm
  

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• Bob drank an entire bottle of Glenlivet on a dare. 9:32 pm
  

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• Bob wrote on James’s wall. 9:00 pm
  

  I so will! Just you watch!

  See Wall-to-Wall
  

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• James wrote on Bob’s wall. 8:49 pm
  

  Nuh-uh!

  See Wall-to-Wall
  

  ---

And right away, thanks to Facebook, you know you need to get some new friends.

I’m in the middle of switching internet service providers, and am in that black period, that dark lacuna, if you will, where my old internet has been shut off and my new internet is still waiting to be activated. In this hour of darkness I find myself moved to quote scripture.

4. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me.
5. I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.
6. If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.(John 15:4-5)

How can we apply this scripture to our lives? It’s easy! The internet is like a nurturing vine. If we are connected to it, we can accomplish many things (like writing blog posts, or sending emails, or reading the new Heroes recap at Television Without Pity); if we are cut off from it, we can do nothing of any value, and we’re useless and withered and sad.

Let this be a lesson to you all.

1. Watched Pulp Fiction. Of course, it took me two nights to get through it, and I was only able to finish it at all thanks to a script I found online that allowed me to stay one step ahead of the plot. I’m a wuss that way with intense/suspenseful movies, especially when I don’t have anyone to watch them with.
2. Checked out Cucina Deli in the Avenues. I don’t deal well with new experiences (shocker!), so I’ll need to go back at least once to decide how I really feel about it. I had cheese/spinach ravioli in a vinegar/oil marinade (odd combination; not my favorite); an avocado half stuffed with a delicious tarragon chicken salad that I need the recipe for; a side of mashed potatoes that I added on at the last minute due to a misunderstanding, and which I didn’t like because it was loaded with white pepper (yuck); and a serving of blueberry bread pudding, which was actually pretty good. To round things out I bought a six-pack of little bottles of San Pellegrino aranciata (I’m down to two now) and a bag of cappuccino-flavored Quadratini (little wafer squares with creme filling).
3. Watched the finale of America’s Next Top Model. I don’t want to spoil the surprise for anyone who has it Tivo’d, but I was highly satisfied with the result, even though the top two were both stellar.
4. Sent my first e-mail from Gmail Mobile, since Comcast was being a butt (continuing a distressing week-long trend). The problem is that there’s no predictive text capability in the cellphone version of Gmail, at least not with the Motorola E815, so I had to manually tap out every single character. This, combined with my tendency to rewrite everything at least twice, made the whole process take a ridiculous amount of time. It was still better than the alternative Comcast was offering, though, which was no internet access at all.
5. Read the following mystery novels: Laurie King’s The Beekeeper’s Apprentice; Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair; and Donna Leon’s Death at La Fenice. I recommend them all, the first two especially.
6. Read Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Parts I and II), both highly recommended. The first is as good as, if not better than, the excellent film based on it; the second is also extremely good, which (as I understand it) makes it leagues better than the execrable film of the same name.
7. Bought a Speedo and goggles so I could start swimming this summer. Those not wishing to see me in a Speedo may contact me for my schedule, so they will know when not to pop down by the local pool.

Head on over to www.SavetheInternet.com to find out how current legislation is threatening the internet, why you should care, and what you can do about it. Once you’re good and convinced, go sign MoveOn.org’s internet petition and join the fight!