Antisocial Media

When I was back in Dubuque last month, I happened to be checking my Facebook when my mom asked whether or not Facebook had been keeping me from actually, you know, leaving the house and talking to people in Los Angeles. She didn't ask in a snarky or mean way, and quickly amended her point to opine that there probably weren't any people worth being friends with in L.A. anyway. Our move to the Left Coast in 2007 was unpopular with our Midwestern families of origin, and my mom remains an unabashed L.A. hater.

I don't hate L.A. exactly, but it's damn lonely. Or at least, that's been my experience, and I haven't bothered to make much of a secret of that. With the exception of one glorious (if frigid) year spent in Chicago, we've spent almost eight years here. In 2007, we knew nobody. In 2015, we know a few people, but they are (with one exception) all people we knew from other places that MOVED to Los Angeles. What gives?

It's true that I spend more time online with friends than out in the world with them, and I've tended to blame L.A. for that fact. And with Los Angeles being as vast and diverse as it is, I should qualify my remarks by limiting them to West Los Angeles, wherein we (as academics) constitute the unsavory element in the neighborhood. Whenever the kids make friends with a medical doctor's kids, I breathe a sigh of relief because I know they will at least "get" that academia is a legitimate (if impoverished) way to live in the world. Don't get me wrong...people are NICE here. It's just that no one has a lot of time, everyone has a lot of money, friends tend to live 45 minutes apart from each other, and there's not a lot of ways to meet people other than the fundraising activities at your kids' schools.

But here's the thing: my mom is right that my Facebook time makes it increasingly less likely that I will, for example, take a pottery class or go to a reading or join a flute choir or do anything else that is actually, honest to go social. I could be making a hell of a lot more effort, but instead I monitor how many likes and comments I have and worry about who didn't like something and/or who noticed that I didn't like THEIR post, etc. etc.

It reminds me of my bloggy days when I used to check Sitemeter obsessively to see where people were coming from to look at my blog, what my statistics were like, which posts people were reading, who those people were likely to be (based on their domain information) and who my obsessive fan was that kept coming back and rereading all my posts. When that fan turned out to be me, I knew that I had a problem.

I have a Facebook problem now, compounded by my real life loneliness, and it means even more dithering around online and less original writing. While the FB status update is a venerable genre in its own right, it is just not up to the standards of your regular blog post. Or at least, the blog posts that my bloggy friends and I wrote in the waning years of the Bush Jr. administration. We were writing about motherhood, graduate school, sex, death, drugs, alcohol (especially alcohol), our sordid pasts in Catholic school and elsewhere, and creating a community of writers that was (on some days) the only thing keeping me going.

A substitute for real life interaction? Well, I ended up meeting most of my online friends in real life, and not one of them pistol whipped me and left me for dead in a rusty culvert. They were all really nice, sometimes adorably socially awkward, and the conversations were every bit as awesome offline as they had been online. Most importantly, we were writers and women who supported one another in both capacities. It was one of the happiest times of my life.

And then...we quit. One by one. Some of us still post every month or so, but that vibrant community of women writers is gone. Now we are all FB friends and follow each others' posts and comments and links with the same avid attention of our bloggy days. But it's not the same. Not the same at all.

Still, the benefits of FB, particularly to a person in exile from her Midwest homeland, have been phenomenal. I love knowing what's going on with friends and having the most recent pics of my nieces and nephews. I love realizing that people I dismissed in high school are actually pretty cool and have unexpectedly lefty politics. Even the conservatives have cute babies. I don't de-friend anyone on the basis of politics because I think that, red state or blue state, we should all be forced to look at pictures of each others' kids. It's a divided nation without a doubt, but I refuse to participate in further divisions. FB is a big chaotic mess of links and comments and likes and stories and images and book reviews and chats and jokes, and I love it. I love it all.

But let's see what happens if I give it up for awhile. Lent will be here tomorrow, and I'm enough of a Catholic to take advantage of a six week hiatus from stuff I should be cutting back on anyway. It just so happens that Lent coincides with what will be one of the most intense writing periods of my life. The book manuscript, she will come due. And the first 100 pages need to be done by Easter.

I'm also going to try to stop eating ice cream straight from the container when I wake up at 3:00 a.m., but patience, grasshoppers.

The Sunday dispensation from Lenten resolutions is controversial in some circles, but I want to have it as an option. Other than Sunday, I'll be abstaining from the crackbook and writing whatever observations I can't bear not sharing on the Internet right here. Maybe I'll even get this blog up and running, who knows? In any case, I'll be posting about my progress and checking in once a week.

In addition to writing blog posts and writing book chapters, I will also try to hang out with some actual Angelenos. There are plenty of people that I would like to get to know better. Well OK, not plenty, but enough to occupy a shy type like me for six weeks. And if I keep bombing? More blog fodder, or Sunday FB fodder. But I'm counting on you to keep me honest.

See you at the poetry reading, bitches.