First meetings
I first got online in college, in the mid-’80s, using BITNET to flirt with talk to people at other colleges via Relay, the forerunner of IRC. In 1992, I joined the WELL and got my first dial-up ISP account. In other words, in Internet years, I am older than dirt. I say all this not to brag about my practically paleolithic status, but to explain that developing friendships online and transitioning them to the real world afterwards (if at all) is a very familiar concept to me indeed. Still, there’s always something both exciting and scary about meeting people for the first time after having talked to them often for a long time, and even more so when it’s someone with whom I’ve developed a genuine friendship. Will they like me? Will I like them? And then what?
In about seven hours, I’m heading to the airport to pick up someone who’s been a mainstay of my online life for most of the last decade. We chat on IM almost every workday – about writing, health, shoes (oh, how we talk about shoes), love, desire, motivation, family, therapy — and I can safely say she knows things about me that very few other people do. And yet in all these years, we’ve only spoken on the phone once, and we’ve never met.
I can’t wait to find out if we’re still friends in person!
Filed under triumphs | Comments (6)Answering the “Undomestic 10″
Feminism is the radical notion that women are people. – Rebecca West
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For several months now, I’ve been reading a blog called The Undomestic Goddess, written by Amanda ReCupido. One of her regular features is to ask ordinary people — male and female, self-identified as feminist or not — to answer a set of ten questions about “everyday feminism.” The answers are usually thought-provoking and occasionally cage-rattling, and I always come away from an “Undomestic 10″ post saying, “Huh. That was really interesting.”
A couple of weeks ago, I realized a couple of people I know had answered the “Undomestic 10,” so I emailed Amanda to ask how she chose participants. Easy, she replied: they volunteered. So I responded, “Let me at ‘em!” And a few days later, I was sending her my own answers to the “Undomestic 10.”
Now, it’s no huge secret that I consider myself a feminist. I don’t even see how that’s controversial. Women have come a long way, but… just witness the uproar over whether Roman Polanski should finally pay the piper for a crime he committed 32 years ago. Why is this even a question? As Salon’s Kate Harding elegantly put it, “Roman Polanski may be a great director, an old man, a husband, a father, a friend to many powerful people, and even the target of some questionable legal shenanigans. He may very well be no threat to society at this point. He may even be a good person on balance, whatever that means. But none of that changes the basic, undisputed fact: Roman Polanski raped a child.” Until we live in a world where even making that argument is unnecessary, we still have a long way to go.
So, yes, I am a feminist. And I’m willing to say so, in public, with my photo and my name on it. And it’s a little scary to put myself out there like that, because there are crazy people out there who hate women, especially women who call themselves feminists. But I’m not going to treat it like it’s a dirty word.
Filed under triumphs | Comment (0)Up the down escalier
Have you ever been on the receiving end of behavior so baffling that you couldn’t figure out whether the other person was being deliberately rude or just plain clueless? And then come down with a bad case of l’esprit d’escalier, the “spirit of the staircase,” in which you don’t come up with the perfect way to say, “Hey, WTF?” until some time after the fact?
Me too. And today I got to make up for it.
Necessary background: there’s a coffee shop near my apartment which I basically use as my second living room. I’m there just about every day, either to hang out with friends or to get work done or to sit and contemplate the crema on my espresso. I talk to a lot of the other regulars, and some of them have become good friends. So it’s not unusual for me to start conversations with people if I’ve seen them there a few times.
Some months ago, I started having conversations there with someone I found intriguing: frequent traveler, food and wine lover, international background, well-read. You know, a good conversationalist. And after a few good conversations, he invited me to meet him for a drink at a new local watering hole one evening. Which I did, although I had to run off after just an hour because I had another commitment. So I figured I’d reciprocate with an invitation to my own favorite bar, on an evening where an artist friend was having an opening.
So. On the appointed evening, my new pal showed up with another friend in tow, spent the entire evening at the far end of the bar, and came over just long enough to meet the artist and inform me that he was going to escort his (by then very drunken) friend home. And then he vanished. And I was astonished. Boggled. Flummoxed. And, frankly, insulted. Mind you, it’s not that I was expecting some hot romantic date — I had actually suspected my new friend played for the other team. It’s just that I think it’s astonishingly rude to show up to an event and ignore the person who invited you! I thought of several dozen cutting things to say when I saw him next. The only problem is, I didn’t see him next. Not for two months.
Then I walked into the coffee shop this afternoon and there he was, standing in line right in front of me. He smiled broadly when he saw me, told me he’d been busy, asked how I’d been. And I cocked my head and said coolly, “You know, I have to ask you something. What the hell happened the last time I saw you? I invited you to do something and you showed up with a friend and didn’t interact with me the entire time, and frankly, I found that shocking.”
Even as the words were coming out of my mouth, I was thinking, Is this me? The person who tries so hard to be nice and give everyone the benefit of the doubt? The person who hates being at all confrontational? Go, me!
My erstwhile coffee shop pal stammered something about having misunderstood, that he’d thought I had just told him about the event and not actually invited him there as my guest, that he was sorry. Then off he went to drink his coffee in another part of the cafe. Oh, how proud of myself I felt! But wait, it gets better. A little while later, he came over to my table and said that he appreciated how honest and straightforward I had been, and he apologized again. And I said it was water under the bridge, in a slightly less chilly tone than I’d used before. And that was that.
Boundary set. BS not taken. The end.
Filed under progress, triumphs | Comments (13)What-huh-sana
So I started taking yoga classes back in January at this little place a few blocks from me. What I like best about it, other than the fact that it’s a 5-minute walk away, is that it’s really small. As in, I don’t think you could squeeze more than 10 people in there. The biggest class I’ve attended had eight, and it felt a little crowded. Usually, classes are five or six people, which is perfect — small enough that nobody gets lost in the crowd. I like being able to ask whether I’m doing something right or say, “Sorry, I don’t know what that is,” when the instructor rattles off the name of a pose I haven’t done before.
On the other hand, Continue reading »
Filed under fears, triumphs | Comment (0)Brave or crazy?
In October 2000, I took my very first solo vacation: a trip to Hawaii. I stayed on the north side of Oahu, in a little B&BÂ in the little town of Kailua. One afternoon, I drove to Haleiwa to watch the surfers, and when I stopped at a sub shop for a sandwich, I spotted a flyer for a drop zone at a nearby airfield. Two hours later, I had an appointment for the following morning to jump out of a perfectly good plane.
Have I mentioned I’m afraid of heights?
Filed under triumphs | Comments (3)