and maybe I will, yet.
I was tempted to write a short story this morning about a woman who mostly communicates with an imagined community. She spends most of the day focused on what to say, how to say it and in anticipation of the responses of people with names that sound like they were meant for CB Radios-- "Bingo1," "FrenchFryeater25," "DRoberts9898" etc. That's what email addresses look like to me. Of course, it was very much autobiography. That is what I've become. I'm haunted by the possibility of reaching some mythical character behind the pseudonym. Often these folks were once, or are still people I see in flesh and blood. However, the internet communication is a thing in itself. It's like whispering in someone's ear or passing a note. It's several steps backwards for me, in a way. In the second grade, I didn't talk to anyone outside of my neighborhood. I just wrote. My writing was very good for my age. All of my verbal energy was focused on it. All of my shyness was indulged, which may or may not have been a good thing for a six year old. Both of my teachers --one for Hebrew studies and one for Secular -- learned to look for my written work and they always wrote back and we had a terrific correspondence. I was very lucky they were so attentive.
The folks out trucking in internet land are a mix of compulsions. Some stay away for days, some check every few minutes, some just don't know what to say even when they read your emails, so they just talk to you when they see you, whenever that might be. Some get back to you right away and engage in tennis volleys with you of email after email until you both tire. You feel like you've told them a lot and that they've told you a lot, and you have. Sometimes I've written as beautifully as I ever could about the most important things to me or to them. And then I don't see them, though they live just forty minutes away or so. The intimacy of the email becomes an excuse never to get together. It affords me a reason to remain shy and isolated like in the second grade.
I wasn't unhappy in the second grade. Actually, I was fairly thin, for me. I had steady routines -- programs I watched on TV, things I regularly talked about with my grandmother when I got home, a time I did my homework and I even limited what I ate. I'd spent a lot of time before this roaming around Israel trying out different places to live with my mother, both of us agreeing that none quite fit. So maybe I was desperate to lock in what I thought did fit and leave it there. There was no conscious decision, however. First grade had felt very noisy and muddled. Too much of everything and too public. So my personality became part of the ether for a year. In third grade it popped right out with a vengeance. I had a wonderfully warm teacher who just made silence seem stifling and made me want to be part of everything.
I'm back in the ether again. It's not painful or anything. I've lost the connection with what makes me want to be part of the everything outside -- and everything outside is shrinking. My school is closing. Randi Rhodes is on Nova M Radio and Air America seems strange to me now, though I still listen sometimes. I hardly see my friends as they are in all different directions. I have long conversations with cab drivers and the lady who takes my orders at the pet food store because they are the people I regularly have contact with. I've become chatty at the grocery store, too. We're all still anonymous with each other, but we share stories of our days just to let the tension out and it feels better. You don't get that on email or from a blog. Emails and blogs are about craft and information. There's hardly any emotion to them, except in the stories I write, I think.
I hope, like in the second grade, I begin to write like a demon.
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