Between fielding phone calls, emails and making preparations for a three day weekend based around a holiday I didn’t realize existed, not to mention don’t have to work on, I stumble across a piece by Laura Matsue about her reasoning behind (mostly) disappearing from the internet. While I can’t relate on the topics of heavy adult drug use and being an artistic drifter through varying big cities in Canada, I do understand the need to distance yourself from the person you are perceived to be by anyone that thinks they’ve seen your life through whatever glimpses you’ve offered them through the computer screen. It’s hard to sever your own connection to the information super-highway, though the importance of said information is open to debate. And what’s harder than giving up the internet? Getting the internet to give up YOU.

Unlike most people I know, I hate having my photo taken. Sometimes I wonder if this is a generational thing; my 90+ year old great-grandmother looks amazing in every photo that’s ever been taken of her—a smiling vision of perfection, even with a beheaded chicken in hand. For a few years the feeling subsided and I wondered if maybe I’d outgrown feeling annoyed every time I looked at pictures of myself. But I didn’t, and I’m back to feeling like I should have complete control over photos of myself, online or not. As a self-critical individual, seldom do the pictures I see of myself meet my own quality control standards. That’s probably the real root of the issue, but I’m pushing that thought aside for the time being.

It’s less about having the photo taken than looking at it later. Why don’t I look the same in pictures as I do in my head? (Simple answer: in my head I am a gray misty something, and in print I am a very solid something.) As a kid, I hid from my family & friends whenever they toted cameras around in the hopes of capturing some magic moment.

Somewhere in the piles of stuff I haven’t talked myself into throwing out yet is a picture taken on my 15th birthday. I’m on the living room floor, held down by my friends so that my mom would have some shred of photographic evidence that not only did I have friends, but they came to my birthday party. Looking at myself in Kikwear pants and a Powerpuff Girls shirt is no less shame-inducing now than it was then. The difference is I couldn’t disappear then like I can now, after a fashion.

The disappearing started small: quickly deleting of pictures I didn’t like from my Flickr account. The joyful sensation that I was effectively disappearing was instantly exhilarating, and soon I had no photos of my face left. Two days later, I deleted the whole account. As I groomed the rest of my social networking profiles, I got pseudo-high off the process of untagging, hiding and deleting images of myself. “What a strange thing” I realized, “to be virtually invisible on the internet.” (A sign not only of the times but my excessive attachment to them, to be sure.) I’m not interested in lurking or dramatically “quitting the internet”, but there’s something important about the fact that converting myself into little more than text accompanied by a grainy, face-free user icon made the internet fun (again).

As far as Facebook is concerned, I am a default nondescript female head shape. Anything I had the power to remove, I did. A big part of me wants to keep it that way; it’s hard to see myself as being “out there” in a way that I never meant to be, in social circles that I find to be repulsive on the whole. I want to live quietly or, at the very least, keep my business off the internet. You’re smirking as you read this on my blog that I have connected to a few of my social networking presences–but I’m serious; there’s something frighteningly old-but-new (and enjoyable) about exercising strict control over what pieces of my life wind up online. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the internet in the last few years, it’s that less is more.

Clearly, I’m not looking to be anonymous–and, to be honest, it’s a bit late for that. I don’t want to be invisible exactly, but I do want to be a part of the scenery in the least distracting way possible. (Amusingly, my computer tried to auto correct that to “detracting”. Relevant?) Acting as background to my own internet presence just… feels safe. The attention from strangers for what I now think might be the wrong reasons can end anytime. What I used to think was validation just confuses me now. Why so much interest? Why the anonymously harsh criticism at every turn?

Maybe you don’t have that problem. Maybe your self-esteem is like a brick wall and you don’t question yourself, ever, because you’re the shit. Good for you! I’m my own worst critic: harsh, unforgiving, and so on. Whatever snarky comment you have to offer, I’ve already thought of.

Posting this might be breaking my only cardinal internet rule: don’t say too much. Don’t give people the type of insight that they would only have if they had gained my trust in person. But I’ve grown up posting in both public and private spaces varying portions of myself I saw fit to put down. I type faster than I write, edit more thoroughly when words are on a screen in neat little rows and frankly, I get writer’s cramp long before I’m done getting my thoughts down.

Is there a safe space in between super-internet-girl and just being me, via internet? I’m not sure and I don’t expect that anyone who would actually read a personal web blog would be, either. In other words, I might just go back to talking about strangers on the subway and varying fiction snippets for a while. When I first started keeping blogs I thought I was capable of saying something, but now I suspect I’ve said just about enough.

It’s clear that Orwell is not tooling around on the topic of poorly constructed writing of any variety. I wouldn’t say Orwell attacks the prose-prone writer so much as addresses the shortcomings of his pretty words. It made me feel a bit better about my own writing in comparison to some of my wordier internet brethren—for a minute, at least. I suggest anyone who feels like a writer read through the essay and let me know how much of what you’ve put out there for others to read was loaded with overblown filler words and/or sentences. I’m as guilty as anyone, though certainly not as guilty as some.

Read it here & then get back to me. I want to know who else is second-guessing the education they received, not to mention every five paragraph essay written and turned into an educational establishment of any level. (Yes, this does tie back into the thought process behind this post.)

I fear summer already, the wet heat that will lead to a constant awareness that I am sweating. Already I can envision myself traveling to and from every location necessary to that day’s agenda with visible wet spots on my clothes; lower back, under my breasts and both arms, maybe at the back of the neck of my shirt. I feel negatively about things like tank tops, shorts and skirts–bare skin requires sunscreen and attracts the city grime too easily. The odds of suffering heat exhaustion by July are high, my friends. There’s no winning in the self-inflicted sweaty hell that is sweater season.

My brain is disconnected from the rest of me, looking out the window from some mid-level floor of a nondescript Midtown office building–it’s 9am and the snow looks like it’s drifting upwards, even though it clearly fell from the clouds overhead moments ago. I force my eyes to stop trying to focus on the individual flakes, the edges of everything gets a bit fuzzy-like the bad basic cable reception on my grandparents’ old TV. With my eyes relaxed it’s easier to take in the movement outside. There are enough windows up here that even without focus, my brain creates it’s own clear field of vision, glossing over the forced line breaks where chunks of big white wall run from floor to ceiling.  This could have been an amazing panoramic view, had some architect not felt the need to turn this place into your typical high-rise.

The similarity of this to any given goldfish’s worldview cannot be ignored. Watching all the nasty particles of meals unfinished and those already thoroughly digested swirling through the tepid water until it settles somewhere below a bulb-eyed field of vision–what would it really be like to see through a fish eye 24/7, anyway? Does it really look like that obnoxious lens every kid uses on their pricey Canon Rebel for party photos? I’ll never know, not like I can ask. Too bad.

From a window on the opposite end of the room, I can see the wind is blowing the fluff-flakes on a leisurely horizontal course. It’s hard to consider that the flakes won’t look like imperfectly pulled apart cotton balls once they make their way all the way to the pavement below. The buildings both near and far look like pop-up book pieces against such a flat gray backdrop, every ornate copper edifice green from the elements, the carefully crafted stonework making eloquent filigree shapes that are never seen except by a building’s neighbors. Who are those types of decorations for, anyway? The people inside the building or those stationed on the upper floors closest to it?

Surely in a few months the desire to smash my face against the glass and drink it all in with my eyes will subside. My brain will follow through with it’s pre-programmed need to adapt to new places, people and things the piles of stonework surrounding me will no longer merit my attention. I doubt anyone but the night cleaning crew will notice the increase in nose prints on the windows, anyway.

People add words when they want things to sound more important than they really are. “Boarding process.” Sounds important–it isn’t. It’s just a bunch of people getting on an airplane! People like to sound important. Weathermen on television talk about “shower activity”. Sounds more important than “showers.” I even heard one guy on CNN talk about a “rain event”.

–George Carlin

In my own head, the wordier I become less intelligent it sounds. Concise explanations are the best proof of understanding any given concept, regardless of how complex it may be. I’m fairly sure that’s the merit Albert Einstein suggested intelligence be judged by, actually. (Correction, he said: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough” but let’s not split hairs here, people.)

Right now I’m caught in this weird space between fiction and anecdotes. Depending on my mood, hour of the night and potential inebriation my writing style varies widely, which makes coming back to the state of mind necessary to carry any of what I write to completion… difficult. It feels like most of what I’ve put up here lately uses too many modifiers and lacks in the substance department. I’m frustrated with myself and the fact that what sounds good in my head becomes not-so-great by the time it makes its way to my hard drive. There’s a slew of half-finished .txt files on my desktop that I can’t force myself to post but I’m not quite ready to delete, either. Maybe one or two of them will find their way here in the middle of the night with a little help from a red-blooded friend. Or Mr. Tom Collins.

This is one of those times I’m glad my family doesn’t read my blogs, and hesitant to post what’s on my mind  because I know the friends with motherly-type responses to my actions do. Forgive me, mother hens, for I have no viable excuse for the small time stupid things I do.

A year and a half plus some, I caved. I bought a pack of Camel Lights. What I really wanted was unfiltered Lucky Stikes, but apparently that’s more of a specialty cigarette than the bodega I was in tends to offer it’s customers. My pack was $6 – that’s fucking unheard of in NYC. I can’t help but wonder where these cigarettes came from… probably “fell off a truck” somewhere outside the city and made their way into Brooklyn.

That first drag tasted awful. It tasted the way every pack of Marlboro Reds I got off a family I babysat for in middle school tasted: Colorado dirt and Los Angeles mantle dust. (That’s not how I would have described them back then, but being that I’m older and more acquainted with the taste of typical household dirt now I can identify these separate tastes based their on geographic differences.)

As much as I’d like to say that I feel guilty for smoking, there’s too many other vices I abstain from participating in for me to be sincere in saying my remorse was anything more than momentary. The first cigarette was immolative time travel, sending me back to the dusty side of the road I walked from school to the bus stop in 7th grade. With every harsh intake I would remind myself that those Marlboros were my sole vehicle of social interaction. I didn’t get on with the kids in my “special” class, or the neighborhood kids that resented all of us on the Purple Team. (No shit, that’s what we were called. In the midst of semi-homophobic Hispanic suburbia it was a death sentence to any potential I already didn’t have for fitting in.) We only interacted with the normal kids at lunch, on the common grounds or in the hallways between classes. Groups did not intermingle, unless you were a girl rocking just enough boobs to really justify bra purchase at the nearby TJ Maxx.

I wasn’t one of those girls; I was socially awkward and looked identical to my kid brother in the face. Braces, poorly styled and dyed blonde hair, cheap clothes that never fit because my hips were too slim and my legs too long. But those packs of cigarettes? They were my connection to all the kids that got suspended for snorting Ritalin in the bathroom. They made me a viable after-class walking partner, because I always shared and never asked for money. If I couldn’t get people to like me at the very least I could get them to tolerate my presence for the 23 minute walk to the public bus stop.

Smoking started as a social necessity, because without them I was left to the in-classroom forced interaction with my fellow pupils. Even at that age I knew that there’s no such thing as a happy lone wolf within the human world.

Yet now with my cigarette in hand, standing in the cold, I know the game has changed. Fewer people light up and even fewer are willing to accompany you into the chill of winter just to engage in the type of conversation you cannot walk away from with nearly the same degree of ease as you would indoors.

“This is the last pack,” I told myself. I’m sure I’ll smoke every last one of these cigarettes, unaccompanied outside between whatever train station I arrive at and my final destination.

I never would’ve put this much thought into the history of my habit if they’d just had the damn Lucky Strikes. I’m still craving them–RJ Reynolds doesn’t have shit on that  harsh feeling Lucky used to give me.

On the subway, homeless people try to amuse you into giving them money. Sympathy is played out so bad jokes like what you used to read off popsicle sticks are the name of the game. After walking around with a cup asking for change, a man with one shoe duct-taped on started in with his first joke.

“How does a fish get high?” Nobody responds, having all been told not to encourage homeless people by interacting with them at some point in our lives. “He smokes seaweed!”

An older man speaks up while filling in boxes in his crossword puzzle. “I wouldn’t've given you that dollar if I had known you were gonna to be goin’ back and forth through the car makin’ all this damn noise.”

Fair enough, I think. He continued to berate the homeless man, not speaking directly to him as he fiddles with things in his pockets and talks about how hard he works for his money. The beggar shuffles to the far end of the car, clearly uncomfortable as the man goes on lecturing him about how rude it is to ask for money and then not quickly vacate the premises. Homeless hands the dollar back to the angry old man, surely thinking the lecture would stop as a result. But he continues, returning the single back to its correct place among the rest of his cash and clipping it into his billfold.

A plastic container of carrot cake surfaced from the recesses of the eco-friendly shopping bag held in place between his feet. He didn’t even stop talking, continuing to complain in-between mouthfuls. I could see the tasty confection in his mouth as he spoke and caught myself thinking too much about other peoples’ business again. Man you have a mouthful of fucking delicious store-bought cake and you’re still complaining. What the fuck is your issue?

But I don’t say anything, because generally that is the best course of action when someone on public transit in Brooklyn is running their mouth. Another crusty old homeless man seated next to him didn’t say anything either, drooling on himself and staring at the floor. I could smell him, see his remaining teeth and wondered if he even really heard what the man next to him was saying. The perpetrator had switched cars several stops before but the backlash continued–his presence was unnecessary for the 20 minute diatribe the rest of my fellow passengers struggled to ignore.

Personally I found the jokes to be far less aggravating than the dramatics that followed from my fellow home-haver. That’s an awful lot of complaining over a dollar. One he managed to get back, no less.

My adventures lately make me think of Aesop’s Fables. I don’t mind all the lesson-learning that’s going on, but it’s keeping me on my toes in a way that’s quickly becoming uncomfortable. Since November there’s been lots of deviation from carefully laid plans, even for things as small as going to see a movie. I like plans, so this has been a rough (albeit necessary) lesson in the need to “just let go.”

On Christmas Eve a friend suggested we catch a movie as one of those non-celebrators still having fun during the holidays gestures. I left my apartment only to discover my ID and MetroPass were not in my wallet as I was supposed to be catching the L into the city. The next 30 minutes were spent in a frenzy  tearing apart my apartment, purse, pockets, route to and from the train station as well as the bodega around the corner from my apartment I had been to earlier. There was a lot of cussing and possibly some over-dramatic statements made about the state of my life as a whole. My cat hid in the closet (wisely) and my roommate probably wondered if It’s amazing how fast time passes when you’re digging through everything you own in an apartment, and instead of missing the movie I pretended I was going to suck it up and bought another unlimited pass to the tune of $89.

I spent the ride neck-deep in one of those negative inner monologues that doesn’t do anything to improve your mood. When I stood up to get off at Union Square, I hit my head on the overhead railing hard enough to elicit a response from two pretty black boys getting on. The insult of money wasted could not have gone without accompanying injury, obviously. It was windy and cold once I got street-level, when I realized I didn’t even know there were movie theaters in Union Square. Everything else was closed (yes friends, even Starbucks).

The opening 3D sequence was just starting at we walked through the door of the theater. Sure, we wound up sitting four or five rows from the front, but the movie was so atrocious it didn’t matter. Sweet sound track and one member of each sex with a cute butt aside, I am curious as to what 15 year old they had writing the script. Don’t even get me started on the facial rendering they had going on. The movie was hardly a credit to the art of moviemaking, but it served as delightful mental thumb twiddling and necessitated the wearing of 3D glasses. Not the shitty cardboard ones I was expecting either, but Weezer-esque skinny black plastic frames like all the emo boyfriends I had in high school wore.

As we head out the front door I decided against holding onto the plastic rimmed 3D glasses provided by the theater, dropping them in the cardboard receptacle they conveniently placed by the door. Once back at a friend’s in Brooklyn, I realized upon digging through my bag that it was not, in fact, the 3D glasses that had been put in the bin. It was my favorite sunglasses. I must’ve looked like a real fruit loop, bursting into maniacal laughter with my face pressed against the wall. As my friend told me, it’s only when you let go of all the menial shit that it ceases to get under your skin. Within my personal life, I’m good with big emergencies but terrible with small inconveniences. Although at present moment, $89 gone to waste doesn’t feel so small.

The next day while digging through my bag I discovered a small, nearly invisible hole in the lining of my purse. Both my ID and original MetroPass were there, just waiting to be recovered from the abyss that is my handbag. I don’t think I laughed as hard as I should have that time.

If you’re ever in New York City (or any other major metropolitan area for that matter) and you can be content with momentary ownership of the city, wander the streets the night of Christmas Eve.

Each passing car echoed off the buildings; I felt the ground shake with every subway car passing underneath me. My footsteps echoed too, and I didn’t feel like being alone through the holiday seasons was all that bad. Chinatown was barely lit up, the homeless of the Lower East Side were tucked away in the alleys that don’t seem to exist here like they do in movie portrayals and I could walk for blocks without encountering anyone. I kept my headphones tucked in my bag and I could feel myself smiling. Someone told me recently I don’t have a poker face and I think that’s true. It’s important to feel something and have it be genuine enough to show. This was the New York experience I had been waiting for – traversing the city at it’s least occupied state. The degree of silence didn’t even seem that out of place, not like I thought it would.

There’s some comfort in knowing that this city does sleep after all, or at least stops moving, for something–for Christmas.

After stopping through two spots I thought would be interesting and realizing everyone else that had gone out was just drunk and sad, I gave up and got on the train at Canal. Brooklyn was the polar opposite: alive. People were out, walking and driving. It seemed less like 2am and more like dusk–the lights from the apartments overhead lit up the street. Music leaking through poorly-sealed windows, smokers huddling outside doorways enjoying a moment of semi-silence before climbing the stairs and heading back into the arms of the people who, ostensibly, love them. They say this is a city that never sleeps, but now I can say that I know better.

I take issue with the concept of celebrating New Year’s, but that might just be because it’s so hard to have a good time when you feel pressured to do so. Make plans! Fuck, you better have FUN! That’s only the real world pressure. The internet pressure is to come up with some great summary of what happened in the last year. Not just that, but what I learned and what I’d like to see happen in the new year. Everyone gets to talking about resolutions and that’s about the time I quit listening.

See, the kinds of people that are going to do things, as in implement great changes in their lives: like working harder, or saving money, lose weight, quit smoking… they are going to do them regardless over the course of the year. I don’t know about you, but most people can’t keep a New Year’s resolution to save their life. The idea that a year ends and a new one begins means there’s a near limitless number of times you can say you’re going to do something and only partially follow-through, if you even start to do it at all.

Can anyone explain how all these plans for bettering ourselves became tied to going out and partying hard–under the influence or not? There’s something amiss in pairing these two concepts in a single holiday.

Seriously though, I had a good New Year’s Eve. I took Jimmy to Shake Shack on the Upper West Side for a birthday lunch that easily consisted of 5,000 more calories than was necessary. I looked super cute while drinking red wine with friends in the Lower East Side in an African restaurant, had a slice of good NY style pizza and was home before all the fruit loops left whatever drunken hoopla they had been involved with that night. I even wore a stupid tinsel covered hat for a hot minute! All the qualities of a good time without any vomiting, crying or horrible crowd-related nonsense. Looks like I’m beginning 2011 with just a little bit ‘o win, eh?