i pretended to be social today. whoo boy. my friend kathryn is sleeping over along with her friend janna, whom i have just recently met. i think the first time i saw janna was monday. by the end of the week she's sleeping over. huh. ^_^
i think i'm beginning to become militantly anti-mother, and so i've been completely throwing off any personal tendencies that are like hers as well as all of her suggestions. interestingly enough, i think some of this is actually going on subconsciously. anyhow, this made sense as a logical progression of paragraphs in my warped mind because the result was that while these two nice social people were over i checked the computer for several things several times. at one point they started up a movie. a bad movie. terrible plot. cheese all over the place. really awful soundtrack. (only you, in case you were wondering. don't touch it with a ten foot pole.) i completely opted out of the first half of the movie and checked the brunching UBB instead. (as well as spending time in the brunching irc channel--vortex!)
is chatting online really social? in lieu of real life people? i don't think so. certainly doesn't end up on the same level. it seems to me simultaneously much easier and much more difficult to converse through a typing medium.
reasons it is easier:

1) people have no prior judgments of who you are based on looks.
2) people are less inclined to take you seriously, i think.
3) you can leave when you want to without any indiscretions.
4) generally many more people to interact with at once than is possible in real life, which takes onus off of the individual for having to constantly be entertaining and witty.
5) it is a lot easier to feign interest.

reasons it is a pain

1)it is a lot harder to interpret what exactly other people mean with bald type and no physicality, expression or inflection.
2) it is a lot more difficult to get your own points across due to the same problems
3) you can't bloody tell when people are feigning interest.
4) people are less inclined to take you seriously. (yes, i feel it swings both ways)
5) one questions whether or not the people you talk to are being genuine. (or artificial =Þ)
6) without physical interaction, we are really missing something. all this hugging and whatever is all nice and cheery, but not the same as one of my real life friends hugging me when i'm down.
7) i sometimes catch myself having difficulty in seeing these names and words match up with an actual person. in some cases i have to mentally drag myself over and force myself to try and look at them as a person. photos are somewhat helpful, but the whole thing still lacks a certain humanity.

well, it's not that i don't see these people as humans, it's just that they tend to have some different quality. it's almost as though my mental view is that of a construct superimposed over the actual person. i realized i was thinking this way due to the perceptions i was getting of some of my real life friends when speaking with them online. the thing is that i think it's an accurate assessment. no one is the same online as in real life. which isn't to say that everyone has some grand plot or they are all in denial of themselves, or they are looking to mislead people, it's just automatic.
i can't be exactly me online. to be me requires a heck of a lot of facial expressions and vocal inflection. the human voice itself transcends the words it speaks. i almost would rather hear someone's voice as it modulates up and down and hear the signs of weariness, joy, sadness, frustration, or ebullience and not get the actual words. i love listening to some people speak. not always because someone has a mellifluous or smooth voice or because they have a melodic quality to their speech. (which incidentally i've been told i have. this one oddball professor at our school persists in asking if i'm a voice major whenever i speak with him despite the fact that he's heard me sing. i finally asked him why and he told me i speak like a vocal major. huh, sounds like that might be a good thing.) i think that along with physical looks, voice is another aspect of people which i enjoy based on my admiration and feelings for the person. or at least i am swayed easily. i really enjoy listening to my close to tone deaf father speak, i love hearing jenna with her extensive use of sarcasm, susan's voice makes me feel happier just hearing it. i have a big fondness for people's individual voices.
which isn't to say that words aren't important. they certainly are. they are tricky beings, though. words have so many meanings, and more meanings are piled on all the time. then you get into connotation! my my.
i enjoy the skillful use of words in writing to expose the most relevant and meaningful connotations for my subject. it's almost a small obsessive hobby. when i use obnoxious and seemingly unnecessarily long words often it is because they better convey the concepts i am looking for. well, at least in my mind. this of course is the brunt of the problem. i have many many odd associations running around in my brain, which other more normal people are probably lacking. when i say "mellifluous," it brings to mind not a definition, but a texture, mulitiple colours, motion and other sensations. this deeper meaning of the word could not possibly be conveyed in any simple manner to others.
wait, here, let me try. mellifluous for me is a slightly cool, flowing, waving ribbon of liquid-like material which is largely comprised of aqua colours with highlights of yellow greens and vivid blues. it's sort of like being in the ocean, actually. how on earth does that relate to the actual meaning? possibly the sensation of smoothly being lifted and carried would be the most applicable. the rest of that is mental junk, i suppose.
meanwhile, that's a fairly closed ended concept. what on earth is kicking around in my brain for looser, more open concepts like "friend," "beauty," "happiness," and "love"? (or all the negative opposites to those?) what do you have as a concept of "thought," "thinking," "soul," "consciousness"?
it's all too hard to deal with. this is why communication is severely limited. i vote we move past all this and start in on telepathy. =Þ
if it was possible, though, would you really choose to use it? i suppose i might go with it, because i think i have confidence that i'm not an evil, sick or bad person, so i wouldn't be that scary. also, i'd have the incentive of understanding. what an important thing. if i could actually get people to understand me, then i think it would be worth whatever side effects. i'd imagine though, that if telepathy honestly were possible, then you'd have quite the issue if you wanted to hide anything. i can't see that just words could get past without all the feeling behind them.
wouldn't that be good, though? somehow empowering, i think. if i could actually just go out and be completely honest with my feelings towards all of these people. it's simultaneously a beautiful and horrifying concept.
i think we'd all have to have a lot more tolerance for aberration than we do. on the whole it just wouldn't work, but imagine letting someone really feel your joy and your sorrow? how about truly being able to illustrate love? how much more valuable would my empathy be to me if i could really illustrate to someone that i truly cared? as it is now i often find myself in awkward silence or muttering pointless nothings.
not that i really believe in telepathy is going to come about. i sometimes do wonder, what with all the mysteries of the human mind, and with the odd little quirky occurrences in day to day life where you end up thinking it isn't possible for such a thing to be coincidental, is it? who can tell? plus these things encroach upon the whole other realm of what truth really is. scientific explanations are touted proudly, but any real scientist shouldn't claim that these ideas must be true. all must be open to question if it is to be in the realm of science.
no, i'm not going to go into truth tonight, i've already run my mouth off too much.
well, here's a final thought. it seems like kat and i have less in common than i used to think. have i changed so much since high school? i don't think that kathryn's a whole new person. she hasn't stagnated, of course, but i think most of the growth she's done has been in terms of her concepts of love, trust and coping with relationships. personally, i'm now finding her company a bit of a stretch for me, whereas we used to be almost an extension of each other, or so we'd joke. she's still a good person, and at this point in time she definitely needs her friends.
i think looking at her family life makes me feel lucky in a way. granted my family isn't exactly functioning well, but at least we all love each other. kat's dad has a lot of mental issues, and i think he doesn't really understand love or how to love. i can't see that he loves his children, and he doesn't even seem to enjoy life. i wonder sometimes how people like that can keep on living when it almost seems they'd rather not.
my family is definitely all whacked out, but we all do love each other. even if we end up coming up with odd ways of illustrating it. yeah, childhood was unpleasant, adolescence was genuinely miserable, and my emerging adult life isn't looking so hot when i'm stuck at home, but i think i know who i am, i have people behind me, and i know what love is. god bless, that matters more than just about anything else. without the love of my friends i'd be no one. of course now i should go and write them all to catch up. :)
posted by Unknown at 2:40 AM