Internet Connections
When we moved to Kentucky we met a nice couple across the street with two cute, all-American looking kids. As is often the case with Army neighborhoods, since the ages of our kids did not match – mine were little, hers were in school – and since they were often away for the weekend visiting their extended families, we would wave to one another, but we never really tried to become friends. I knew my daughter would love to get to know them better since they had a huge wooden play structure in the backyard, but she had to settle for the playground down the street where we could come and go as we pleased without worrying about bigger kids stepping on her. The husband half of the couple worked in the same office as my husband, so occasionally we would hear news about them or their kids, things that were especially good or especially bad, but usually unless we drove by and waved, I didn’t really think about them.
One day the HP came home from work and said our neighbor across the street was going to be sent to Kuwait for a year, much as the HP has now been sent overseas for a year. I felt bad for the wife, bad for the kids, but I knew their families were nearby and at the time, pre-9/11, we didn’t really think there was must danger involved. As it turns out, we were wrong, but the danger was not in Kuwait, it was at home. While the neighbor husband was gone, I was pregnant with my son and I would wander the house at all hours, unable to sleep because I had developed a debilitating allergy to the state of Kentucky. I would often stand at the kitchen sink and stare out the window to see if any one else in the neighborhood was up or had a light on, if anyone else was stressed out or unable to breathe like me. More often than not, when I looked toward the neighbor’s house across the street, I would see the familiar glow of the blue TV screen. I would think how sad and lonely she must be, how she must have trouble sleeping while her husband is away just like I do.
How naïve I was. When her husband returned home from Kuwait, there was a great flurry of activity with moving trucks and relatives and other people coming and going. My husband finally ran into the neighbor husband and asked him if he was moving or had been reassigned. That was when the neighbor informed us that the day he arrived home from Kuwait his wife had taken the kids and left him for someone she met online while he was away. He had no inkling that any of this was going on, and like him I also felt completely duped. Here I was wasting my pumped up, hair trigger, pregnancy sympathy on her, thinking she was groggily watching Happy Days reruns to pass the time, and really she was looking for love online. The blue screen that glowed through their window at all hours was not the TV at all, but the computer. I still find it hard to fathom that sort of betrayal (of her husband that is, after I had the baby and came down off the hormones I realized that she wasn’t really trying to hurt my feelings). Forget the fact that meeting people online can be rather sketchy, particularly if you have small children, but if you are married to someone and so unhappy that you want to leave him or her, I think the polite thing to do would be to mention it before the moving van rolls up to the door.
And yet, now that my husband is away, here I sit at the computer night after night, writing these little essays and sometimes reading other people’s blogs (depending on how late it gets while I’m trying to push myself to 1500). We have plenty of neighbors, some of them pregnant, who may look out their windows and see the blue glow of this screen through the cracks in my mini-blinds. Are they more suspicious than I was, or would they just think it was the TV the way I did?
I would never be one for sitting in on a chat room since it takes me a long time to compose my thoughts and since the whole idea of chat rooms sort of creeps me out. Obviously I am not sitting here looking for love, but I suppose I am sitting here seeking a connection, even if it is just to an imaginary audience. I envision that someone will read a sentence in something I’ve written and think “that’s pretty funny” or “that’s pretty pathetic.” I don’t really care what the reaction is; I just like to think that I am causing one
Earlier this year I read the book Gilead which I would describe as a great book, but since it won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award last year, that seems a bit unnecessary. Unfortunately, I gave my copy of it to my mother, so I can’t quote it exactly (which might be an argument for putting off this little dissertation until I get it back, but I’ll just fix it later), but it is a story of an older minister who is dying, and the book is basically a long letter that he is writing to his young son. I won’t go into the plot details here, although I may write a book report on it someday, but at one point the narrator says something along the lines of: when you are writing you are never alone, because your reader is always there with you. I feel that way to. I know when I write these things I am talking to someone out there, and that makes me feel connected even though the reader might be someone I’ll never meet. In a way, that is a perfect situation for me. I’ve got friends and family all over the place that check in with me regularly to make sure everything is going well here on the homefront. I’m glad to talk to all of them, but since I spend all of my time in a house with 3 small kids, I am not exactly full of captivating anecdotes of my fascinating life. My conversations with my sisters usually go on for a while and then end with the phrase “I’ve got nothing,” nothing new to report, nothing interesting to say, nothing more to add. I can’t exactly trap the well wishers on the phone and give them the story of every street I’ve ever lived on, but I can put it out here.
Reading other people’s blogs is more confusing to me. I don’t know if I should be checking back a couple times a week to read what is going on in the lives of people I don’t know. I am always looking for something to read since I have all of this time on my hands in the evenings (I usually blow through my magazines the day they arrive) so when I find a blog of someone who is interesting and funny (even when he or she is ranting), I find myself eagerly waiting for more. But more often I find myself adding blogs to my list of favorites only to later delete them when the blogger turns out to be more egomaniacal, offensive, pathetic, depressing, or boring than I had initially thought. I feel a little bit like I am turning my back on them, since I had become one of their listeners, one of the people that they were talking to when they wrote. But really, other people are not writing for me, they are writing for any readers that are out there and I’m sure there are plenty who don’t react the way I do. I have not set out to deliberately bore people, and hope that readers will move on when they find I am irritating them.
Given this discussion about my own motivations for going online, I guess I shouldn’t jump to conclusions about my neighbor in Kentucky. Maybe she was just trying to find a friend online, and maybe she would have left her husband with or without a boyfriend waiting in the wings. Maybe her husband was a big psycho, we really didn’t know them. Maybe if she hadn’t found someone to talk to online she would have felt trapped in her life and gone crazy. Probably she was just an immature loser with time on her hands who found the attention from strangers exciting. She is a perfect case study for the argument that, for better or for worse, the internet is the place you can always find someone to relate to, whether you are the most bizarre sort of pervert or just a lonely woman at the keyboard with nothing else to do.
One day the HP came home from work and said our neighbor across the street was going to be sent to Kuwait for a year, much as the HP has now been sent overseas for a year. I felt bad for the wife, bad for the kids, but I knew their families were nearby and at the time, pre-9/11, we didn’t really think there was must danger involved. As it turns out, we were wrong, but the danger was not in Kuwait, it was at home. While the neighbor husband was gone, I was pregnant with my son and I would wander the house at all hours, unable to sleep because I had developed a debilitating allergy to the state of Kentucky. I would often stand at the kitchen sink and stare out the window to see if any one else in the neighborhood was up or had a light on, if anyone else was stressed out or unable to breathe like me. More often than not, when I looked toward the neighbor’s house across the street, I would see the familiar glow of the blue TV screen. I would think how sad and lonely she must be, how she must have trouble sleeping while her husband is away just like I do.
How naïve I was. When her husband returned home from Kuwait, there was a great flurry of activity with moving trucks and relatives and other people coming and going. My husband finally ran into the neighbor husband and asked him if he was moving or had been reassigned. That was when the neighbor informed us that the day he arrived home from Kuwait his wife had taken the kids and left him for someone she met online while he was away. He had no inkling that any of this was going on, and like him I also felt completely duped. Here I was wasting my pumped up, hair trigger, pregnancy sympathy on her, thinking she was groggily watching Happy Days reruns to pass the time, and really she was looking for love online. The blue screen that glowed through their window at all hours was not the TV at all, but the computer. I still find it hard to fathom that sort of betrayal (of her husband that is, after I had the baby and came down off the hormones I realized that she wasn’t really trying to hurt my feelings). Forget the fact that meeting people online can be rather sketchy, particularly if you have small children, but if you are married to someone and so unhappy that you want to leave him or her, I think the polite thing to do would be to mention it before the moving van rolls up to the door.
And yet, now that my husband is away, here I sit at the computer night after night, writing these little essays and sometimes reading other people’s blogs (depending on how late it gets while I’m trying to push myself to 1500). We have plenty of neighbors, some of them pregnant, who may look out their windows and see the blue glow of this screen through the cracks in my mini-blinds. Are they more suspicious than I was, or would they just think it was the TV the way I did?
I would never be one for sitting in on a chat room since it takes me a long time to compose my thoughts and since the whole idea of chat rooms sort of creeps me out. Obviously I am not sitting here looking for love, but I suppose I am sitting here seeking a connection, even if it is just to an imaginary audience. I envision that someone will read a sentence in something I’ve written and think “that’s pretty funny” or “that’s pretty pathetic.” I don’t really care what the reaction is; I just like to think that I am causing one
Earlier this year I read the book Gilead which I would describe as a great book, but since it won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award last year, that seems a bit unnecessary. Unfortunately, I gave my copy of it to my mother, so I can’t quote it exactly (which might be an argument for putting off this little dissertation until I get it back, but I’ll just fix it later), but it is a story of an older minister who is dying, and the book is basically a long letter that he is writing to his young son. I won’t go into the plot details here, although I may write a book report on it someday, but at one point the narrator says something along the lines of: when you are writing you are never alone, because your reader is always there with you. I feel that way to. I know when I write these things I am talking to someone out there, and that makes me feel connected even though the reader might be someone I’ll never meet. In a way, that is a perfect situation for me. I’ve got friends and family all over the place that check in with me regularly to make sure everything is going well here on the homefront. I’m glad to talk to all of them, but since I spend all of my time in a house with 3 small kids, I am not exactly full of captivating anecdotes of my fascinating life. My conversations with my sisters usually go on for a while and then end with the phrase “I’ve got nothing,” nothing new to report, nothing interesting to say, nothing more to add. I can’t exactly trap the well wishers on the phone and give them the story of every street I’ve ever lived on, but I can put it out here.
Reading other people’s blogs is more confusing to me. I don’t know if I should be checking back a couple times a week to read what is going on in the lives of people I don’t know. I am always looking for something to read since I have all of this time on my hands in the evenings (I usually blow through my magazines the day they arrive) so when I find a blog of someone who is interesting and funny (even when he or she is ranting), I find myself eagerly waiting for more. But more often I find myself adding blogs to my list of favorites only to later delete them when the blogger turns out to be more egomaniacal, offensive, pathetic, depressing, or boring than I had initially thought. I feel a little bit like I am turning my back on them, since I had become one of their listeners, one of the people that they were talking to when they wrote. But really, other people are not writing for me, they are writing for any readers that are out there and I’m sure there are plenty who don’t react the way I do. I have not set out to deliberately bore people, and hope that readers will move on when they find I am irritating them.
Given this discussion about my own motivations for going online, I guess I shouldn’t jump to conclusions about my neighbor in Kentucky. Maybe she was just trying to find a friend online, and maybe she would have left her husband with or without a boyfriend waiting in the wings. Maybe her husband was a big psycho, we really didn’t know them. Maybe if she hadn’t found someone to talk to online she would have felt trapped in her life and gone crazy. Probably she was just an immature loser with time on her hands who found the attention from strangers exciting. She is a perfect case study for the argument that, for better or for worse, the internet is the place you can always find someone to relate to, whether you are the most bizarre sort of pervert or just a lonely woman at the keyboard with nothing else to do.
posted by Shannon at 9:56 PM
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