Despertar

kinda like high school

In general, I'm the same person in real life that I am online. (By the way, Writing.com is the only online community to which I've ever belonged for longer than twenty-four hours, besides Facebook, which is more like a worst-case scenario of real life, so for me, online is synonymous with on Writing.com.) Both in real life and online, I'm too timid to be mean to anyone, so most people end up liking me. I'm not saccharine or anything, but I give off an impression of being way sillier and more naive than I am, because I'm interested in how people participate in really pure conversations. After dinner, over wine, I like to ask my companions questions like Would you rather have feet for hands or hands for feet, which is, I guess, sort of the real-life equivalent of an internet survey.

In real life, I have about four really close friends who are distinct from my other friends in that (1) each is part of my daily routine, (2) I genuinely don't feel any sort of obligation when it comes to catching up with them on what's going on in their lives, and, most importantly, (3) I feel sick to my stomach whenever one is mad at me. Ditto online: Four close friends I more or less treat like friends and who have the power to actually hurt my feelings.

Both in real life and online, the members of my Top Four dislike, resent, hate or have hated each other. This is consistent since high school. And then I see archetypes like the Seinfeld and F*R*I*E*N*D*S gangs, my classmates sitting in the same groups of four or five people in the cafeteria and little trios of blond girls breezing past nightclub lines, and I know it must be me. It's my fault. Other people belong to groups, and even if in any group some bonds are stronger than others, at the end of the day, your average twenty-four-year-old has a cohesive enough social circle that she can pull together, say, a birthday dinner party for five. I can't really do that because of all the awkward subtext to the relationships between my friends. I stick to one-on-one stuff, or I mix one Top Four friend with a bunch of casual acquaintances.

Anyway, I've always blamed myself for this phenomenon, but until about a week ago, I thought the extent of my responsibility was that, because I feel awkward sharing intimacy with more than one person at a time, I tend to surround myself with friends who come in singles. In other words, because I had such dismal experiences being part of a trio in grade school, I avoid befriending people who are already committed to existing close friends. (Lame.)

But then, a couple weeks ago, I got into a minor little thing with a couple of people online. One of the people involved is in my Top Four; she and I gossip regularly and freely about celebrities and Writing.com people alike. I know things about her real life and she knows things about mine, and I consider her someone I can talk to without danger of having my business blabbed everywhere. The other person involved is the person I referenced obscurely a while ago as probably liking me less than I like her--she and I only really ever make contact when we're working on something together or when I email her for more details about something she said that seems juicy. This, probably, is why I get the sense she doesn't like me more than she does: because I come across as a total gossip, who only ever has anything to say about anyone when it's really negative or judgmental.

So I messed up in an albeit excruciatingly minor way: I made a comment to one party that could have been construed as disloyal to the other. Publicly, with no anticipation that either party would take issue with it. And, of course, it blew up in my face, if on a tiny, temporary scale. Both parties reacted in ways that excused it as not that big a deal, but rationalized it as, oh, you always do this sort of thing with everybody.

It became a way bigger deal to me than it ever was to either of them, because I realized this is why all my friends hate each other, and why I can never have a Ross and a Chandler and a Monica of my own. I think I probably am an asshole gossip. I felt silly even trying to defend myself last week, because it absolutely cannot be said that I do not delight in analyzing every tiny happening down to a fine powder. I totally do, and I need people to do it with, and this is the main reason my friends are my friends, because they will delve with me into the minutiae of things that happen to me, to them and to other people.

After I hooked up with Hugh, we agreed that we weren't going to tell anyone because we thought it might complicate things among our mutual friends. (He probably also thought it would screw his chances of scoring with other girls in our section, but that's how naive I was even a year ago, that didn't even occur to me then.) After we reached that agreement, the very next day, I found out he had told our friend Sam, their friend Jennifer and some number of other people. I asked him about it, and he said, "Oh, I thought it would be okay to tell Sam because I figured you were going to tell Tina."

And what do you know, I had told Tina. Mere hours after it happened. A complete play-by-play, fodder for hilarity over the next several months.

Hugh is one of my best friends in the city, and at one point he and Tina were sort of friends, but now Tina has nothing but disdain for Hugh because of how badly he hurt my feelings last year, and the unfiltered way in which I described it to her.

Meg and Tina like each other now, but in high school they fought because I whined so much about their respective social agendas.

Justin thinks Hugh is a pretentious douchebag because of the haughty voice I affect whenever I quote him.

Meg and Tina both probably think Justin deserves his balls cut off.

And online, I don't even have to get into that, it's so obvious. Contempt City.

But, like, I do have a code; I am not two-faced; I do respect my friends' feelings and privacy. If I'm taken into confidence, I keep that confidence. I do not blab secrets, and I try not to be, like, inarticulately disparaging. I try to deal in facts and specifics ("Amy is moving in with that ex-convict she met online after dating him for two weeks") rather than in principle judgments ("Amy is an idiot"). I feel like any person is sort of the sum total of her actions, and that people shouldn't mind having their actions attributed to them.

Also, I try not to be a hypocrite. If I tell Tina about something that happened in bed with Justin, I fully expect that by sundown, she will have told Madison, Kendra and Nina. When I go to dinner with Hugh and Andrea, I skip the pretense and operate under the assumption that Andrea has heard as much from Hugh about me as I have about her. Et cetera.

But whatever. I am a jerk. I resolve to try to be less of a busymouth in 2009, okay?

*

Online popularity. Um, I don't know. Somewhere in the middle of "Straight No Chaser" , I got pretty popular, largely, I think, because of the island story I was co-writing with Aaron. I was actually ninth on the Most Viewed Journals list for a while, narrowly beaten out by Ernie, who was openly cheating by continuing to collect views as he deleted entries. As many have pointed out, online popularity is empty, but it felt nice to get lots of comments all the time, and to be name-dropped in the journals of strangers.

This journal isn't on the radar yet, I don't think, but it gets more views, on average, than the other one did, so maybe it will hit the top of the list someday. It's funny--no matter how many views my entries get on average, FtL leads invariably get at least twice as many, which suggests a lot of people stop by once and are just completely uninterested in coming back. Mostly I have no idea idea who's reading. I can think of about fourteen people who make their readership known, which means there are maybe thirty people who read in secret and never say anything. I don't mind it, I just don't know why. I really doubt if my life is that interesting as it's depicted here; the only people I can imagine caring about Justin's birthday party or the last time I talked to Marcus are the ones who communicate with me in between to get more details.

Whatever, none of it bothers me. I liked being popular, I like being less popular. I like the feeling of being sort of a Writing.com personality, dropping into Scroll for twenty seconds and having people I've never known address me as "Moody." It doesn't feel real, but it doesn't feel fake, either.

Um, the end.

*

I don't refer to what i do as "blogging." Nothing against it as an art, it's just that term connotes a cultural relevance I can't claim here. At the same time, I think it's ridiculous that anyone claims to be writing just for themselves. If I didn't think at least one person would take something away from my lame Sims entries, I wouldn't put them here.

I write for Spidey, because I can count on her never to make me feel like a fucking idiot. I write for Ernie, because often I deserve to be made to feel like a fucking idiot. I write for katwoman and Caroline because I admire their craft and desperately crave their approval--also because their advice is always amazing without being preachy. I write for Katrina because I suspect she views my life as some sort of spectator-sport soap opera--she has definitely elevated the recurring character of Marcus to legendary villain status. I write for Jenn and Erika because, very simply, I want them to like me. I write for Elisa because I am secretly hoping she'll find a bone to pick with something else I say, and I'll have a reason to actually write something coherent to try and prove her wrong. I write for Shadow and Steve and other infrequent returners because they seem to like it here sometimes. I write for j because I feel like she recognizes my life as a life, sees it's made up of thoughts and feelings and mistakes. I write for Christina and highly evolved because, unless I am mistaken, they actually care about things that happen to me, and they care what happens next. I write for OGG because she thinks I'm cute.

All the words left over, those are for grim.