A Minor Point of Interest and My Brave New World

First, the Minor Point of Interest
The tub faucet in our bathroom has two positions; one indicates the water will come from below, and fill the tub, the other indicates the water will come from above, as spray. It is a rudimentary, old-school faucet; you turn it so the arrow faces down or faces up; there are no other options. We have been in this apartment now for over a month; every time I want to take a bath I squint at the faucet, note the position of the arrow on the faucet, turn on the water, and get drenched fully clothed. Every. Single. Time.

A Brave New World
As the mother of two very young children with a spouse who is out of town a lot, I suspect I am not alone in the fact that these days I spend a lot of time, particularly very late at night, online. Actually, I know this to be true; I have noted over the past few months the somewhat disturbing number of emails I receive from mothers or workaholics or those unfortunate souls who are both between the hours of, say 10 p.m. and 2 in the morning, when all law-abiding citizens over 30 should really be asleep. Or at least doing something more beneficial to society than googling their second grade crushes or shopping for vintage suede coats on ebay. Or even, as much as I love these fellow night owls, and they are some of my favorite people in the world, sending missives to me.

It occurs to me that in some ways, these days, I am living in two different worlds: the first is the real world of my daytime life, in which I interact with family members, friends, colleagues, neighbors, students, lots of hilarious 4 year olds and some local nutty alcoholic homeless people who really like my dogs. The second, alternate-universe world is the virtual one, in which I keep in touch with 500 times more people than I ever would in real life, play copious amounts of online Scrabble, buy groceries, shoes and the occasional vintage suede coat, scope out abandoned dogs who need loving homes and then sites designed for people who are addicted to Petfinder.com and can't, reasonably, add so much as a goldfish to their existing menagerie. I made that last one up: there is no such site to my knowledge, but there should be.

I was a latecomer to the Internet, partly due to ineptitude and fear, partly on principle, for reasons related to my initial reluctance to buy into cell phones and cable TV. There is a real part of me that believes, deep down and insistently, that we have become way too reliant on our various technologies, and longs for the days when people wrote real letters and met each other in person for meals and talked on telephones whose attachment to the wall meant that you actually needed to be seated in a chair to use them. I find it irritating when I am talking to somebody now and I can hear them click-clicking on their keyboard; I suspect we all have been guilty both of chatting on a cell phone in a way or place that annoys somebody as well as being really ticked off by somebody else's doing the same.

And yet. And yet, online, in the last few years, so much has happened to me, so many things that would never have happened any other way. I am not talking about some double life in video, a side gig in identity theft, an illicit correspondence with a prisoner, or even a 15-year-old posing as one. I am talking about how much I love Amazon.com and the ability to choose exactly the edition of a book I want and have it delivered to my doorstep, at a discount and with free shipping, in a matter of days. I am talking about the hours I avoid at the grocery store, and the fact that Fresh Direct is never out of celeriac, or buttermilk or whatever ingredient I need to try a recipe in an out-of-print Jane Grigson cookbook I never could have found at either my neighborhood chain bookstore or my lovely independent one. I am talking about the fact that on Facebook, which a friend signed me up for initially for the Scrabble, I received a lovely message from a third grade friend I have had no contact with for almost 30 years and learned that she is a clearly brilliant economist living in Dubai.

There's so much more--I know I will think of a zillion other examples before tomorrow. I can debate politics, send articles of interest instantaneously, share pictures and get invited to things. I have access to every take-out menu in New York, seating charts for theater tickets, the ability to order movies without waiting in line at a Blockbuster. Because of my online life, I read my hometown paper, listen to music, maintain a gratifying witty banter with a college friend I rarely see, have a window into the lives of people I know well and admire or love. In fact, I have had no bad experiences with this particular technology, other than being daunted by the process of installing, using or setting up related components of it, and I have enough friends who are good at this and willing to be bribed with a homemade blue cheese burger (you know who you are) that it isn't even really an issue.

I know I am not alone in this either--my alterna life online--because one of the things some people hate and fear about the internet is the loss of anonymity, the whole Big Brother aspect of it all, and Facebook, for example, lets me see who's online 24 hours a day. It's a lot of you. Emails indicate when they've been sent; I always wonder if anybody notices when I've sent one in the middle of the night, but the truth is I never check the messages I receive: who cares? Like Las Vegas, or Atlantic City, where the casinos have no windows and the idea is existence out of time, the Internet exists in its own timeless, hourless sphere. Not to mention this whole blogging thing, which is both incredibly intimate and incredibly impersonal, if you stop to think about the fact that anyone writing a blog is really sending it out into infinite space, not just into yours.

That's enough for now (is it jarring just to announce that mid-idea?). But I am pleased--not necessarily by what I've written, which I'm too tired to reread--but by the fact that I dove into this at all, as it is very much related to one of two book ideas I'm working through. More later...ASW

I inadvertently signed off the way I signed my emails--what's that all about? I definitely do NOT think blogs should end with some Edward R. Murrow flourish. Sorry. One-off. Will not happen again.