ramblings

It stays hot — even here, at 5797 feet — too late on summer nights for me to be able to go to sleep at a reasonable hour, which explains at least in part what I’m doing up at this hour writing and making chicken stock. Well, it explains the up part. The chicken stock part is because I have this chicken carcass that needs to be made into stock, and it’s way too warm during the day to heat up that much for that long, so I figured I might as well do it now.

The writing part is just a sudden desire to try to articulate a few things I’ve been thinking about.

I spend a lot of time thinking about my online presence and its various manifestations and how those have influenced, and in some cases created, the friendships in my life. Of course, I also spend a lot of time online, tinkering with various aspects of this presence and talking to my friends and my “friends,” and so it is perhaps not surprising that I think about it quite a bit, too.

At the moment, it breaks down kind of like this

• This here blog is supposedly the real me, but it tends to get neglected far more than anything else.
• lis.dom is the library me
• Facebook is the place for people I went to high school with and other strangers from the past to find me. I’ve had a website of some sort or other since 1999, so it’s not like I’ve been hiding, but I guess a lot of people who don’t really want to find you are down with finding you on Facebook. I used to play Scabulous on Facebook, too, but I couldn’t keep up.
• Flickr is where I always intend to put more pictures that I forever intend to take.
• Twitter is on hold while I sort out my relationship with it.
• FriendFeed is where I spend most of my time.

By next month, of course, all of that could change.

I was just saying today to my friend Steve that (and I quote, from my own IM transcript): “I also sort of wish this kind of thing had been around when I was young and convinced no one else had my problems — although that may be a function of being young, not of medium.”

Reading, it has always seemed to me, serves two purposes: it reminds you on the one hand that there are a lot of people who are not like you and that on the other hand there are a lot of people just like you. I’ve always thought of reading in that sense as meaning reading books, but reading FriendFeed will give you much the same experience. And that means that those of us who face the world best by reading about it suddenly have a whole new place and way to encounter the world.

I might well have found some new world just as wonderful by some other route, but I think I can’t discount the medium in this case. The medium isn’t the message — as the Twitter-to-FriendFeed defection showed, I think a lot of us don’t feel brand loyalty — but it is the means (and perhaps someday we’ll have social network protocols as the means?). All those invisible ones and zeroes, all those packets pinballing around through the network — they make this thing, whatever it is that we have here.

I am trying to regard it as one of the blessings of this summer that I have not yet had a bad peach.

Given war, natural disasters, the collapse of various financial markets, deaths, and anxiety, it doesn’t seem like much of a blessing, but I’m trying to think of it that way.

And these have been just ordinary grocery store peaches, not the wonderful ones that I bought thirty pounds of a few years back that were selling from a roadside stand. These have just been on sale at the grocery store for $1.49 a pound, and I get a few every time I go, and they’ve all been good.

I never used to like summer much — school was out, which many people liked, but as school was something I was good at and summer activities were mostly things I was not good at, I sort of missed it. Fresh fruit was sort of my consolation prize for summer. It was hot and muggy and people were forever telling you to go play outside, where it was even more hot and muggy, but you got fresh peaches, and strawberries and blueberries and cherries and plums and melons and even mulberries, which are not really very good but which I ate in large quantities because we always seemed to have a mulberry tree in our yard.

I was a late-comer to cherries. I’d always thought I didn’t like them, since I never liked anything cherry flavored. Then the summer we were fourteen I stayed for a week in New Jersey with my oldest friend, who was living there with some family friends for the summer. We went into New York City almost every day, and when we got out of the train station, we’d walk along until we found a fruit vendor, and Sara would say, “We’d like a pound of cherries, please.” Then we walked along the streets of Manhattan, eating cherries out of a brown paper bag and spitting the pits into the gutters. We’d walk and eat until we’d finished the pound, and then, more often than not, we’d happen upon another fruit vendor and say, “We’d like a pound of cherries, please.”

I don’t eat cherries in quite that kind of quantity anymore, but as soon as I see them in the supermarket, I buy some (and then, because I am old, I take them home and wash them and put the pits I’ve spat out into the garbage can) and think about being fourteen and fifteen and seeing New York for the very first time.

So on days like today when the world seems to be not too great, which is how it generally seemed all the time when I was in high school, I am trying to be thankful for fruit.