Good Mornthing: Transition and Liminality

[blissmorgan]

What a week this has been! I've been dealing with an interpersonal matter that I am not going to get into here for Reasons, but it is causing me to take stock of how I operate in certain relationships, how I act and react, and how I really do need to adjust and hone my focus in terms of the sorts of connections I'm seeking to make. This is on top of/in addition to the similar adjustments and honing I am making in terms of my internet and social media, what with the impending doom shuttering of G+ and the clumsily-handle-at-best attempt at sanitizing Tumblr enough to make it palatable to Apple's pinched mouth app store. Holy crap you guys I had forgotten how much I missed using strikeout for snarky asides in the middle of my text.
All of that came into very deliberate focus on Wednesday night when I went out for celebratory shenanigans with my brother. slipjig3 has just imported his LJ content over here (WOO!) and is joining us in the wide dream, for which I am very excited. He and I became friends in the intertubes well over a decade ago, when I was still heavily/frequently using Livejournal - before Strikethrough, before I got married to my Ex even. That initial bonding was really simply as tenuous as we had some friends in common and shared a birthday. It is amazing, the foundations a friendship can be built upon. I suppose it would be more fair to simply say that initial connection was the breaking of ground. We've woobled in and out of each other's orbits since then, and have frequently made the noises at each other in passing of "Hey, we should do a thing for our birthday!" and then promptly failing to follow up on that.

This year, though - this year, we did it! Like real grownups! We made concrete plans, and followed through! Check us out!

There was bowling, which became "disco bowling" less than ten minutes after we started, but maybe three songs in the "disco" music became 90s alt/rock and we were both very happy campers. We were also really bad bowlers. Like, really, TERRIBLY bad, to the point that we went at least three boxen before anybuggy got a pin down, and the woman in the next lane was trying to offer me tips on how to manage my stance and release as if I were new. I'm not new, I'm just old, and it's been more than half a decade, and I was raised on candlepin so full size bowling is not really my bag... okay fine, I'm a little new, but also not. She was funny though. She told me she needed to help me so that I could kick his butt, because on a first date it's important to win the game so as to show dominance.

Reader, I just about died laughing. XD

Post-fooding we discovered how incredibly terrible the bowling alley is in terms of food service - or rather, in making it clear how their food service operates. There is a distinct area in the middle of the alley, blocked off with half-walls, where there are booths and hightop tables surrounding a small 3-sided bar. We seated ourselves, talked, perused the menu, talked, waited, talked... finally I got up and went to the bar to inquire to the bartender about foodservice and whether the kitchen was open. The bartender proceeded to completely ignore me to serve and talk to a dude for at least three full minutes. Finally I snagged another alley worker on her way toward the back to ask how we get food. Apparently you have to go to the front desk to order it, get a buzzer, and then go back there to collect it when ready. That was all well and good except that then we went to the counter to order food and got ignored as well.

This probably wouldn't have rankled so much if (A) we had known how their food service rolls and (B) if we weren't so dang hungry. We found another place to go and headed out - but wait! What is this?! There is an arcade within the bowling alley! I looked at slipjig3 and asked, "Do you think they have Skee-ball in there?" because what could possibly tickle my fancy more than tiny pseudo-bowling although really the more I think about it Skee-ball is the love-child of bowling and darts housed within the actual bowling alley. The micro in the macro! They had it. So of COURSE I sorted out the loading of money onto a card (because in this arcade, all the machines are fed not by actual coins, nor by tokens meant to be similar to but gently distance you from the cash reality of coins, but by plastic cards onto which you load money that is then deducted from them by the machines not in denominational amounts but in points, which mathed out to be one point per twenty-five cents) and played a round of Skee-ball. I got 18 tickets (which, as with the money, are not real tickets but rather the concept of tickets the mere CONCEPT of APPLEBEES, stored on the card), which the girl at the desk rounded up to 20, and we scoped out the tiny prize options, because it was our BIRTHDAY and we deserved PRESENTS. There was very little that one could get for 20 tickets, let alone get to of, but then I saw the temporary tattoos. There were unicorn designs, pirate designs, dinosaur designs, and a few other things, all for five tickets apiece. Naturally, we each got a unicorn design and a pirate design. I haven't used the pirate one yet. (It's a compass rose.)


This has been a very long-winded recounting of events to get me back round to where I initially intended to go, which was that we found a place to have a really delicious dinner (Their liver and onions was SPOT ON) and chat. It was half catching up, a small portion vent session, and a big portion navel-gazing and vaguely philosophical rumination. And also a whole bunch of Oh There's This Thing You Might Like To Watch/Listen To/Experience. We talked about a lot of mistakes we have made, or unsatisfactory experiences that we've had, and introspected together on coping and learning and trying to proceed more carefully and thoughtfully in the now and future (because, obviously, we can't do aught about the past). Ultimately what we both came to is that we desire meaningful connection, rather than the appearance of voluminous connection. I talked up Dreamwidth to him because, while there are not a lot of us here, I find myself having actual conversations with folks here - asking questions, learning things, not attempting to meme-ify or outclever each other.

Not having emoji reactions here is a blessing. It relieves me of that unconscious feeling that I need to click something and prove that I read it; instead, I read all the posts my folks make because I want to read it all, and I respond to the things that I feel like I really have something to say about, or ask about. We wondered aloud, slipjig3 and I, about where that all started, and came to the conclusion that it's a part of capitalizing on the internet. How do you know which posts/blogs/tweets/etc. to yank out of their chronological place to push at people unless there's a way of quantifying the attention it's getting? And you cannot easily quantify with actual word-based responses; many people are lazy, or nervous, or just don't want to respond with typing, yet will have no problem with a one-click response to show I Was Here I Saw This Thumbs Up Yes Good. A thumbs-up, a plus-one, a clickyheartforlike - these are easily quantifyable, measurable, and therefore easy to plug into algorithms to assess for marketability. It makes it easier to give the thinnest veneer of interaction, because how many things have I clicked a little button on today? I'm making my presence known to my friends! I'm interacting!

Except that I've also been ravenously lonely. Friends in the internet are real, but the methods by which we are allowed to communicate with one another have changed insidiously over the last decade to decade and a half, and I don't know that that is necessarily going to slow/change. In the last three weeks, I have had in-person get-togethers with three different people, and each time it was focused, content-rich (so to speak), and gratifying to me in an unquantifiable way, on a human-to-human, we-are-social-animals-and-crave-interconnection kind of way. It feels good, and I want more of it. This goes well hand-in-hand with some discussions I have been having recently with SALM, vis-a-vis trying to balance the making of plans with people without needing PERMISSION from my partner with the making of plans with people while CONSIDERING THE NEEDS of my partner. In brief, basically...I can make plans without consulting him first, and I'm not going to end up being somehow punished. We're partners, and just as I hold down the fort at home when he is at class or out with friends or visiting family, he can hold down the fort while I'm getting tea with someone or attending a gaming session or visiting folks out of state for a weekend. He's supportive of me having a social life that doesn't involve him, because it's healthy for me and because it does not in any way lessen his and my relationship for me to have connections and experiences with others.

There's been a lot of stuff in the intertubes that I've been seeing for the first time this year, although it's apparently been A Thing for a lot of people for a while, wherein one chooses a sort of guideword, a touchstone word for the coming year. I thought my word was going to be something else entirely, but instead it seems to be the one I gave the jeweler who made my shawl pin: Release. I am being released from a lot of my entrenchments, and also am releasing certain habits, reactions, and modes of thought to which I have clung and in which I have wrapped myself. As I move through this personal and social liminal space, this transition, this uncharted borderland, I am the Lindworm, and I am shedding and burning my old skins. I will grow new ones.

Comments

[slipjig3]

I can't begin to tell you how badly I needed that. One of the things that strikes me now, reading your post, is that the thing I missed the most about LJ was that unlike any other social media platform it felt like That. There was something genuine about the interactions that made them feel, well, like interactions, rather than reading The News of People I See Occasionally. It's not that we didn't do the friends numbers game (I certainly did), but there's that extra beat, that extra inhale and exhale between thinking and doing, be it a post or comment or whatever, that you don't realize is as important as it is until you go back and immerse yourself in that world again.

Thanks again for an awesome evening, and thanks for bringing me over here. It's still hushed, but not silent; let's see what happens. (And by gods let's do this again sometime!)

[blissmorgan]

Yeah, I've definitely always done the friend numbers game - we talked about the G+ aspect of that in the diner - but the percentages, as we said, are definitely in the favor of actual engagement here in terms of signal to noise rather than in terms of marketably measurable easy numbers.

We both needed that so badly, and yes, let us do it again; ping me in private channels this week and we can do a stare-and-compare of our schedules. Maybe we can do a museum or something. Do you like museums? Maybe, hah, we can both look at upcoming events posted to FB for our respective areas and in between and find something fun.

[johncomic]

I hear all this about the interacting in depth rather than volume. And yes, this place is better for that than most. And I find that you are one of the ones I choose to read in depth, so I am glad you are here too. I need to make the time [and find the courage] to write more in depth here. (Like, my comments are generally longer than my posts!)

Your last two paragraphs are kinda breathtaking. <3

[blissmorgan]

My last to paragraphs are, I think, where I finally got around to the actual point of what I wanted to say once I got past the play-by-play of funtimes had this week. Like a recipe blog, where you have to wade through all the background story and how-this-food-has-context-in-my-life stuff before you get to the meaty-gritty.

[wa_bob]

It's funny, but I also had an IRL experience with someone from G+ yesterday @fractalfrog - My first one actually! We sat and ate BBQ and just talked and it was great. I am so used to knowing people online and knowing people in person, but not really knowing both. So I have broken that barrier and it was nice. Maybe now that I am free of some of the "obligations" holding me back that I can do some more of that in 2019. Maybe indeed it's not to late to do something of a reset in life? Who knows for sure, but it's something to try at least.

I hope the knots of things past keep untying to let the present be better.

[blissmorgan]

Aaaaaaa yay! I got the chance to hang out with fractalfrog a few summers ago when she was up my way for a visit, and it was awesome. She is muchly fun.

It is never too late to do a reset in life. It might not necessarily be easy, because the world is geared for teens and twenty-somethings being in that stage more than us older folks, but it is doable. Self-assessment and reorienting is, I have been finding over the last few years, incredibly rewarding. It definitely helps to have someone or several someones perspicacious and loving enough to learn your past, notice things about you in the now, and make recommendations or observations to lever you out when you get stuck in a frustration of some kind. Spoiler: You can be one of your own someones in that way.

[fexurbislexorbis5]

I love this! I love having silly birthday adventures - and some of my very favorite times have been adventures that incorporate both getting to be silly and play and getting to have in depth conversations about our lives.

I am in complete agreement with you regarding internet interaction. I do see a certain value in being able to simply "like" posts - in being able to say "I see you" with ease - but that is a very different thing from really taking some time to read and interact. One is sort of junk food and the other is a home made meal.

I've been thinking a lot about needing permission to do things in this world, in partnerships and in general. Thinking about it in terms of relationships strikes me as a whole other level of how this works. Thank you for the mental chew toy:) Oh - and happy birthday!

[blissmorgan]

"One is sort of junk food and the other is a home made meal." This! So very much this - you have hit on a very succinct comparison. Both technically give you something, but ultimately one is more nourishing and healthful in the long term, while the other just sort of keeps you going-ish.