My back’s been bugging me—I did something to it in my break dance class last Wednesday that seemed to go away, and then after modern dance class Saturday (felt nothing unusual) I went out to brunch, and as I stood up from the hard wooden bench I was sitting on, that tweaked spot suddenly grabbed me and bent me double. For a moment, just a moment! But I was hobbling all weekend. Monday, some better, but bad enough for me to skip Salsa class (damn!) for fear of re-injuring it. Wednesday (yesterday) still some twinging, and I stayed home from breakdance (damn!) because I had planned to try again at going snowboarding tonight. But today! Still hurting a little, just enough to make me feel like maybe I shouldn’t take my first crack at snowboarding in this particular physical state. My fear is of injuring it for real before it heals, and staying home from fun things for a month instead of a week. So here I am, updating my blog a record second time in a single month when I’m not traveling. Crazy! (damn!)
If you know me, you know that my tendency is to fill my days up with pre-planned activities. I can’t seem to stop acquiring hobbies and friends and interests, and so my calendar is solid blue. If you want a date with me, you have to schedule it two weeks out, and I never, never, am just hanging out at home alone unless I’m sleeping.
But there have been three evenings this week that were filled with activities (salsa, breakdance, snowboarding) that I have been forced to cancel at the last minute, without having time to make other plans to fill them. This is a little bit of a revelation to me.
So, Sunday night I had actually planned as an unplanned evening, saying no to a fun-sounding dinner so that I could satisfy my own craving for relaxed time alone. (If I had only known…) so what did I do, that Sunday night?
I discovered MySpace.
Now, I didn’t pimp my page or anything, but I posted some recent pictures, wrote a little blurb about me, practiced my pathetic and fledgling html skills by coding some links and paragraph breaks (thank you, MySpace, for being so barebones and making me remember things!) But then the dangerous thing happened—I started looking up friends.
Jesus H. Christ, is everyone in the WORLD on MySpace? I feel like I showed up late to a party I thought I was too cool for, only to find out all the cool kids had beat me there. People I thought wouldn’t touch MySpace with a 30-foot shishkebab skewer had glorious pages with background graphics and embedded songs and like 350 friends. I am clearly behind, so I got my clicking finger in gear and pushed the “invite” button over and over.
But then, when I ran out of the every day friends and monthly friends I could think of, I started expanding my reach—I still only had 40 friends! I had to look popular! And started looking up people I was once introduced to at parties, my high school teachers, the boy I had a crush on in San Francisco in second grade…and I found some of them. Now this is cool. In the past few days, I’ve been exchanging messages with people I haven’t spoken to in…well, 9 years is the farthest-past one I’m in touch with so far.
So anyway, that’s how I spent Sunday night.
Now, Monday, I was unexpectedly without plans. This is a little different from planning to be alone. I got home and found myself a little at a loss. What do you do when you planned to be wigglin’ your hips to South American music with dozens of other people, but instead are faced with your own messy little studio apartment?
Well, I started the way I usually do—by sitting down at my computer to check my email. But oops—look! I have some new friend requests from MySpace! And a few new messages! So I logged in—and came up for air hungry, tired, lonely and depressed THREE HOURS later.
This will not do, MySpace. The way to cure loneliness is NOT to look at pictures of people clearly having fun with other people who are not me. To read their comments praising, teasing, sharing things with each other publicly on the page, flaunting their private conversations for me, the lonely person at the computer, to longingly devour with sadder and sadder eyes. MySpace, you purport to bring people together, but you are only mocking those who are not currently having a super fun blast with their friends. MySpace, why did you hold me captive for so long that night? I have learned your unfriendly wiles, MySpace, and I shall be wary of you in the future.
So at 9pm I saw the light and left the apartment—it was an emergency response. I had to get as far away from that glowing screen as possible. I needed food, anyway, since my larder was completely emptied of everything except the popcorn I was vapidly munching while I compulsively eavesdropped on other peoples’ lives. I walked up to Bleu and they sat me in a cramped little table in the very very back, and I had a delicious glass of wine and a caprese salad, and I sat there in a funk trying to write. But I was bummed! and lonely! And sometimes it’s fun to go out by yourself for dinner, but I wasn’t in the right mood, and the seat was uncomfortable, and I was right by the drafty entrance to the kitchen, and I couldn’t fit my notebook on the table with the food…
So it went until the 8th or 9th sip of wine. O but then, raising my glass to my lips and lowering my eyes to my glass…what startling colors! What strange lights! The shiny dark surface of my wine looked like some mad luminous angel-child had opened a box of angel-crayolas and scribbled all over the wet slippery surface—and was continuing to edit, as the liquid jiggled and the colors broke, zipped, bent, and re-formed under my very (literal) nose! It was ridiculous and startling and incredibly beautiful in the hyper-neon burner-art way that I usually privately scoff at. I was completely moved.
Over my head were the best Christmas lights ever, thickly placed and long, more purple ones than there ought to be in a decent, self-respecting set of Christmas lights. It was their casual, sexy, ghetto-chic luminescence that had descended so forcefully into my alcohol and my brain, completely shattering my grump and bringing life back around to pretty dang cool. I swear. Christmas lights. I’m serious, guys, this is all we need to put the world back together—just get everyone, every single person, alone at a cramped little table with a dark and tasty glass of red wine and a cosmos of colored electric lights over their heads. Just don’t let anyone leave until they’ve seen the reflection. It will change them all.
So anyway, emerging from my gloomy introspection to greet the world with a joyful eye, I noticed the couple at the table in front of me clearly having a first date. And they clearly liked each other, and were trying to impress each other, being a little cautiously flirtatious, saying witty and interesting things. And—funny—here I just left my apartment to run away from vicarious living and here it is again in front of me, but so much better this way, live, with strangers. But then—then! I heard the following exchange between them:
(after some conversation about the restaurant-rating website where he had apparently discovered Bleu):
Girl: So will you write a review of this meal?
Boy: No. But I’d like to write a review of YOU. (seriously, he said this. AND it seemed to go over well. Go figure.)
Girl: (oblivious? intentionally? Hard to say) Do people do that on those culinary sites?
Boy: No, they do THAT on MySpace.
I will never escape.