Things In My Cabinet: Walking Over Cliffs

I googled "going away party" and obviously this was the only
possible result I was willing to use. I mean, really, who doesn't
love them some emotive pop art? Nobody, that's who.

I leave for California in ten days. I had my goodbye-Massachusetts-you've-been-good-to-me party last night. Some of my dearest friends drove all the way from Boston just to make sure it became a dance party. I felt superlatively, almost shockingly loved - there were so many wonderful people there, and they had come because they were going to miss me! Dopey as it sounds, I guess I just didn't expect there to be so many of them. I feel so damn lucky.

But it also got me thinking. Although I still have a handful of good friends in the Bay Area, it really is only that - a handful. Like number-of-fingers-not-counting-the-thumb handful. And I am going to have to do that terrifying, nerve-wracking thing of creating a social life for myself basically from scratch, and it's going to be hard, because honestly? I am kind of a hermit and a homebody. I'm building a giant magical museum at least in part so everyone will want to come visit ME. I'm bad at going out and meeting people I get easily fed up at parties. And when I'm feeling nervous, or out of my depth, or on the edges of things, well - I can be a pretty critical, judgmental person. You know, like I don't want those dumb kids for friends anyway, so there! That internal, automatic sneer is a habit I have been (slowly, laboriously) trying to break myself of for a while now. I realized this morning, after a night of drinking and letting the idea for this post pickle percolate in the back of my skull, that two totally unexpected things have been quietly helping me out, and I hadn't noticed til just now. In fact, I don't think it really clicked until I got the email this morning that the query for the novel I'm working on is up for critique at The Quintessentially Questionable Query Experiment. See, these two things are totally unexpected. They're things I never thought I would have. They are:

1) internet friendships
2) grudging respect for people who make me wildly stabby

Why do I have these things, and what are they doing to me? Well, let me see if I can explain...

I'm sorry, this image is just too amazing not to use. Via
1000 Things I Like (talk about narcissism. Sigh.) It's
real toilet paper! You can buy it!

1) Okay, so until very, very recently, in my mind the internet was basically one part useful things (google, wikipedia) and one part terrifying things (everything else). I have a Facebook, and I don't hate it, because I'm actually only Facebook friends with people I generally want to talk to at some length in real life. But Twitter? JUDGE JUDGE WHAT IT IS FOR JUDGE JUDGE. Blogging? NOBODY READS MY BLOG WAHHHH. Social networking? ONLY NARCISSISTIC VENTURE CAPITALISTS DO THAT SHIT YOU CAN'T FOOL ME. And then I wrote a novel for NaNoWriMo last November, and I was clicking through their website out of desperate procrastinatory boredom one afternoon, and I came upon the Book Doctors. Long and short of it is I wound up buying their book, The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published. It's a pretty awesome book, and they are pretty awesome people. But what stuck with me more than anything else was what they had to say about social networking and social media. Basically, and I'm paraphrasing what I got out of it here, they explained that the internet is like a giant party, and the best thing to do is try and find the people who you actually want to get to know and go, like, have a real conversation with them.

This may not sound radical. But to me, it was MINDBLOWING.

This book is so awesome and it turns out the
authors are super helpful and approachable.
It's one of the reasons I'm going to California! 
If you've ever thought of building your own
house, you should totally buy it.

I had always thought of people who had "internet friendships" or "internet communities" as, well, um, lame people with no lives. I am not proud of having held this opinion. But it is the truth. And what the Book Doctors said was a serious eye-opener. First of all, they recommended using social media to self-promote between one in ten and one in forty interactions. The rest of the time? Talk to people! Find things you love and share them! Respond graciously or appreciatively to stuff you think is awesome! Ask questions! In a word, make friends. Be a good friend. Be generous, a strong listener, and a supporter of others, and people will take that seriously. I thought this was the COOLEST IDEA EVER. So that's just what I did: I went and found all the blogs I could that I thought were full of smart, funny, interesting content. Then I looked at the blogs that they followed. I now follow genius blogs like Snobbery, Lucy's Football, and the Insatiable Booksluts, among others, like a slightly over-eager puppy - you know, small and excitable and dopey and slightly inclined to drool with delight over having found people on the internet that I really want to be friends with. The content is great, but it's more than that - the folks who run these blogs are awesome people. I want to actually connect with them. And then I found the people on Twitter who were doing things I thought were fabulous, which is why I now get to go do awesome things at the Exploratorium and why I have a super long and fascinating email waiting to be answered in my inbox from one of the writers of the book that got me into natural building.

This might be the best third wheel image ever.
Via We Throw Rocks At Cars

So that's well and good. But something else interesting is happening. I don't know if this happens to everyone, or only secretly-hermity people like me, but whenever I meet someone I think is really cool, I immediately get super nervous. I worry about being over-friendly, about butting in, about not picking up cues, about what if they don't think I'm cool and it's just like sixth grade all over again. In real life, I have an easier time keeping this anxiety under wraps. If I see people I'm excited to get to know having a conversation, and I walk up and join in and it becomes clear I'm a little de trop, I can just make a pleasant excuse and walk away. You can't do that on Twitter. Am I aware of the ridiculousness of worrying about whether people I only know through 160-character interactions like me? Yes. Yes I am. But actually I'm bringing it up not to handwring about my social anxiety (which is not actually all that crippling - we're talking toe cramps, here, not paralyzing fear) but rather because I've been slowly becoming aware that in some ways social media interactions require more care and thought than real-life ones do. There's so much more I don't know about the people I meet on the internet - and I don't just mean whether or not they're actually serial killers. Here in Northampton, it's pretty likely that a twenty-something I meet at an art event shares my political and cultural views. But on the interweebles? Just because somebody can write a hilarious review or enjoy my blog doesn't mean they think like me at all. And you know what that means? Not judging. Not making assumptions, or casually snide remarks, or vast generalizations. It means I actually have to think about what I say. Because the wonderful writers and thinkers I've found to converse with are people I've gravitated towards for their wit, humor, insight, and ability with words - that is, people whose way of expressing themselves makes me respect them a whole bunch. And so even if it turns out that they are certain that I'm going to hell, or believe Obama was born in Kenya, or think that my desire to have unrestricted access to birth control is stomping on their religion, or just really really REALLY like guns, it's a lot harder for me to just dismiss them with a wave of my giant you're-an-ignoramous handkerchief. Because they're not. Or I wouldn't have followed them in the first place.

And this brings me to the other thing that's been teaching me some Valuable Life Lessons recently: people who make me stabby. "Stabby" is a term I have picked up from the book blogs I've been following. It is an awesome word and very expressive. (See, this is where the little toe cramps come in: oh god are they going to think I'm trying to be JUST LIKE THEM? Like the obnoxious girl in middle school who dresses just like the popular girls and totally fails at being cool? and then the second wave of oh god am I being too self-deprecating? Should I just play it cool? Am I ruining everything by admitting my uncertainty? at which point I start thinking HALP HALP A HEFFALUMP and then I calm the heck down.) So, here's the thing about the people who make me stabby. This whole internet presence thing is basically to slowly but surely begin to build some kind of momentum behind the Museum of Joy - to get the concept out, to interest folks, to begin to really dig in to what would make such a museum. And I'm not allowed to leave anyone out. If I'm going to build a museum about joy, it has to be for everybody. What kind of joyless, controlling, self-righteous pleasure fascist would make a museum about joy for some-people-only?

La freakin' la la la. That's me, folks.
Via Wikipedia.

So I'm going to have to develop my compassionate Buddhist self and chill out on being Judgey-Mc-Judgerson if I want to have this whole life-long-goal thing happen to me. And you know, even though the Bay Area is full of people who are very much like me, it's all full of people who aren't. Which is a very important thing for me to bear in mind as I stumble blindly off into the next part of my life. I don't want to have broken out of my easy, cozy life here just to find something identical back in the Bay. This whole process of moving across the country is so profoundly unreal, so full of uncertainty and the unknown, that the image I've been holding in my head for weeks now is the Tarot card for the Fool - maybe my favorite of all the cards, actually, one that's had special meaning for me for a long time because I love the feel of falling but I am very very bad at walking forth into anything unsettled or unclear. Is it a total coincidence that the Fool is also totally the card for the main character in my novel? Actually, yes. I didn't write him to be like me. In fact, almost the opposite - I seem to have been inspired by the sense of mystery and uncertainty and possibility in my writing to actually gets up the guts to find it in real life. Walking blithely forward over the cliff. Leap and the net will appear, says my favorite Zen koan. I'm doing my best. And that means suspending judgement. It means making room for the unfamiliar. It means being willing to step forward into discomfort. Man oh man am I not good at that. But I'm learning. Slowly. And I want to give my heartfelt thanks to each and every one of the internet friends I have made in the last three months for helping me walk out over the cliff.