Get ready for this mo-fo. She’s a big’un.

Why I Hate The Internet:

Okay, so I don’t hate the Internet. I love the Internet. I love the stupid Internet way too much, which, if you’ve ever loved anything too much, might help you understand why I’m saying I hate it. (What a lovely, clunky sentence that was!)

It’s one of those addictive personality things, I think. Like noodles, alcohol, fidgeting and cigarettes (never tried, but dreamed about … weird). It’s just so intensely, immediately gratifying. It lets you to do things you really shouldn’t be allowed to do. Like, for example, Google your way to the equivalent of drunk-dialing an ex. An inclination that used to be appropriately road blocked by, but not limited to:

Your friends. (Unless you were drinking alone. Sad.)
Manual dexterity. (Dialing is harder than typing.)
The mental capacity it takes to remember an old number. (No Google.)

Among other things.

Thanks to the Internet, doing stupid things is just way too easy. It’s too easy to find people you hate, and even easier to find people you like. Everybody and their dog is blogging, so it’s similarly too easy to pseudo-catch up with people you really have no business catching up with. And of course, what you find out is inevitably so patchy and encoded, you’re left frustratingly unable to get the real story, because calling the person you’ve just been spying on is, if not expressly forbidden, at least frowned upon. Which is how it should be. If it weren’t for the Internet, I mean.

Sigh. I think I’m in a bad mood. I spent the morning obsessively (like, I literally couldn’t stop for a full hour) reading other people’s blogs and bios, which of course has left me feeling sad.

Okay, it’s relevant tangent time:

Remember my “How to Break Up With A Friend” piece? (You probably don’t, but let’s pretend you were supportive and following my career a year ago, shall we?) Anyway, I thought it was funny. Not everybody did, but I did, and in the end, since it matters more to me that I like my writing than if you do, that’s what counts. Anyway, it was a joke. A joke that I’ve actually put into practice in real life, but one that wasn’t particularly saddening, which is I guess why I made a joke of it. I thought that breaking up with a friend, as troublesome as it can be, was ultimately easy.

Now, let’s get one thing straight: I’ve both dumped friends and been dumped. When I was the dumper, I went the full disclosure route. I aired every grievance. Then I shut the door to further communication. It was a major power trip. In contrast, the time I was broken up with was fairly emotionally devastating, because it happened with no explanation, no aired grievances, and no warning. That said, the brush off was ultimately effective, and with the wisdom of a little perspective, I’d categorize it in J-Dawg speak as “harsh, but fair”. So when I recently found myself in the position of having to break up with another friend (who, okay, I briefly, but not seriously dated) I figured I knew what I was doing. I didn’t want to do a big grievance-airing brush off, but I didn’t want to be harsh, but fair, either. I was hoping to stumble onto some middle ground.

Silly, Jenny. Tricks are for kids.

Anyway, it backfired. I did the break-up email. I tried to explain, and I left the matter open for discussion so that the dumpee wouldn’t feel blindsided. Only, the dumpee didn’t accept the dump. The dumpee argued. In fact, the dumpee made such a good argument – an argument that negated all my carefully thought out and (somewhat kindly?) worded explanations – I had no choice but to reneg on the whole thing and agree to give the friendship another chance. What is THAT about? It may well be the most mature thing I’ve ever done. Or, it may be the most stupid. I subscribe to the “you can’t be friends with everyone” theory, and tend to prioritize friendships (in a semi-bitchy way), so maybe I give up on things too easily. I don’t know. Anyway, the point is, the whole thing was weird. It put me in a weird mood. And as a result, I’ve been Googling in the manner of someone who gets sad and eats a whole tub of Ben and Jerry’s to compensate.

See? I told you it was a relevant tangent.

So this brings me to my rant about the Internet. There are a lot of people out there in cyberspace with whom I used to be friends. And reading about them, via blogs, in their own voices, is just so overwhelmingly sad. It’s like a parade of failures. All the relationships I abandoned, couldn’t make work, or was booted out of are on display. I think I obsess about stuff like this more than most people. (Damn my need-to-please complex!) Darrell doesn’t seem particularly bothered by such things. Probably because even the people he’s lost touch with still love him like crazy, which he deserves, of course. I’m completely paranoid that people I’ve lost touch with hate me or have forgotten I ever existed, which may be worse.

None of this is helped by the fact that so many of my friendships past have been with unbelievably smart and interesting people. If I’m to believe the blogs, these people have remained unbelievably smart and interesting, while I, on the other hand, have remained whatever it is I was then. Which, while occasionally funny (not in a “ha-ha”, sort of way, but in a “wow . . . you’re funny?” sort of way) is maybe not as smart or interesting by comparison.

There are a lot of lessons to be learned here.

1. Covert voodoo is fairly ineffectual.
2. Living life according to a sort of Nick Hornby, High Fidelity-inspired manifesto is perhaps less than wise.
3. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, episode 118, “Entropy”, when Tara said, “things fall apart. They fall apart so hard. You can’t ever put them back the way they were,” she was completely right. When she got to, “Can we just skip it?” she was genius.

I know what you’re thinking.

Jesus, Jen. Save it for your diary.

Noted.

P.S. 2018-05-23: Jump down below the photo for my update.

Photo by Kev Seto on Unsplash

P.S. 2018-05-23: This was a tough read for me. Embarrassing, as all my youthful writing efforts are, but also personally embarrassing because I’m trying so hard to obscure what it is I’m really talking about.

This is the first time I ever blogged about friendship, about losing friends, and about my pervasive grief over those losses. These subjects have become something of a theme for me. I believe now that it has something to do with self-image, or a lack of self-esteem. I think I obsessed (and perhaps obsess) over losing friends because it felt (and sometimes still feels) like an indictment of my personality, proof of my worthlessness, more evidence of “the truth about me”. I want to meet my young self and give her a hug and send her off to a good therapist, because I clearly needed one. I wasn’t managing well, and I lost so much time to this kind of needless, circular, self-hating worry.

The “friend” I was trying to break up with at this time was a guy named Adrian who I’d had an on-and-off sort of romantic relationship with for years. I met him at Queen’s when I was just 18 and he was 20. We were never really friends. The relationship was always something different and was never particularly healthy. I last saw him in 2008. He did his usual thing, dropping into my life with a flirty and sexually aggressive manner that was sure to do nothing for my life but cause drama. After a decade, I was tired of it, but remembering this time in 2006, when he’d somehow managed to shame me out of ending our friendship, I didn’t bother trying to explain. I simply stopped replying to his emails and stopped answering his calls. We haven’t spoken since and I have never Googled him.

Photo by Heather Zabriskie on Unsplash

By contrast, the other person I’m talking about in this piece is Matt, my high school-era boyfriend who I dated between 1996-2000. He started blogging in 1997, so early, I sometimes think he invented it. And I used to Google him, mostly because once we split, he didn’t want anything to do with me, and because his online life made me feel inferior and I think I enjoyed (or at least had become comfortable with) feeling shitty about myself at this point. In my 20s, I secretly felt like I’d stolen a huge part of my personality from Matt. We were together when I was very young, probably too young, and he was extremely smart, loud, a little manic, and opinionated. He had a huge personality. He was four years older than me. He seemed to know everything. He was so funny, and often angry. And at a very formative time in my life, I just sort of absorbed as much of him as I could. I didn’t know who I was, and I wanted to be someone he’d love, and I think I thought being like him was best way to go about that. I mirror other people naturally, but I emulated him deliberately and obsessively. I always tried to walk at his pace, in his stride, even though I’m 5’4” and he was over 6’ tall. I even tried to match my breathing to his, which means whenever we were together, I had to think about how I was breathing, modify what came naturally. I really did these things. Even this Buffy reference … I got into Buffy entirely because he got into Buffy. It’s a small thing, but it’s indicative of everything. When I think about so many of the aspects of pop culture I think I loved as a younger person, I often can’t remember which ones I actually loved, and which ones I had to strive to love. Even now, 20 years later, there are little mannerisms, little aspects of my personality that I know I first got from him. This feels strange to admit.

It’s perhaps important to confess now that by 2006, Darrell and I had been together for three or four years. We lived together, but we were deeply unhappy. No one knew. We slept in separate bedrooms, and I often felt I hated him. However (and this feels important to me to say), whenever I’d suggest splitting, he’d lose it. He sometimes cry, sometimes beg. He’d make promises. Break things. Punch things. I wasn’t without guilt. I can be mean, and I said terrible things to him on a regular basis. Then, exhausted by yet another circular, repetitive fight, I’d wait, but nothing would change. I don’t believe he was faithful, and I’m sorry because I know it’s not cool to say, but fidelity and monogamy are important to me. In my view, we had an agreement and he was breaking that agreement. I tried not to think about it. As I said in a previous update, I had my own problems. Depressed and anxious, I was self-medicating with wine, nursing a secret and rapidly-accelerating eating disorder, and barely making it through the days. He was going to work, and playing hours of World of Warcraft in the evenings. We barely spoke. We never touched. People called us a “perfect couple” and keeping up that façade was just one more thing on my plate. I desperately wanted to fix it, but I didn’t know how. He was shitty to me in a lot of significant ways, but to be fair, I wasn’t helping. Googling Matt, engaging with Adrian – these were just two very obvious ways in which I was dealing with (or rather, partly responding to and partly ignoring) the problems in my actual relationship.