My Imaginary Friends

I live in New York, and so I have no friends. Friends are people you actually speak to, people you see once in a while. This is not possible in New York, where everyone is busy, busy, busy and lives a 1-hour train ride away. I made a New Year's resolution once to spend more time with my friends, but since they hadn't resolved to spend more time with their friends, we still never saw each other. 

 The telephone stopped working when the answering machine was invented. I had a dear friend, John Fox, a writer, and when he died I wrote my newspaper column (Newspapers! Remember those?) about how all we ever really did was leave each other answering machine messages, and so, even though he was now dead, I could just go on leaving him messages and it wasn’t going to be much different than when he was alive.

Now there is email, there is Facebook. I have 8 email accounts: one for WFMU, one for freelance work, one for spam, two for pseudonymous comment postings on blogs, one in case I ever set up my website, one for local political activism, and one for “friends.” As of today, I have a total of 2,624   unread emails. I haven’t been on Facebook since March 16, so I have 19 friend requests, 16 messages, and 6 event reminders. Apparently I once signed up for Linked In—although I have no memory of doing that—and I have about a dozen folks clamoring to link up with me there. It’s overwhelming. There are so many people I should write back to that I can’t bring myself to write back to anyone.

I think this is why I like the radio, and the Twitter, and the blogpost: They are one-way communications. I sit here typing, “Here I am! Here I am! Over here!” with no expectation of response and no intention to reply.

Here I am, here I am: Not waving, but drowning.

Comments

[Lynchie from Aberdeen]

If you're going to rip off the poet Stevie Smith, at least have the decency to credit her...

[Aabra]

"If you're going to rip off the poet Stevie Smith"

Who??

[Отдел продаж]

I sympathise with you and your loneliness in a network.

[Brooklyn Bridget]

I don't see how quoting someone is "ripping them off," especially if the reader gets the reference. People don't go around saying William Shakespeare or Emerson or The Bible everytime they use a few famous words to make a point. Or maybe Lynchie does, in which case how tiresome to always have to prove you read a book once.

[CYA]

"I have 8 email accounts: one for WFMU, one for freelance work, one for spam, two for pseudonymous comment postings on blogs, one in case I ever set up my website, one for local political activism, and one for 'friends.' As of today, I have a total of 2,624 unread emails."

Two Things:
There is a way for you to use GMail to send and receive all of your mail in one place and still be able to send out from those addresses. Once you set that up use GMail Filters to handle it all.

[Go Drown Already]

You try to come off as overwhelmed by life in NYC, like we're supposed to pity or empathize with you, but you really just sound like you're a solipsist that is unwilling to put in the necessary work to maintain any kind of meaningful relationship.

Sounds to me like your "friends" are better off not hearing back from you. Geez.

[beafdog]

we are all nerds, worthless haters, and pedantic to boot. we, the commenters.

[James]

I liked your post Bronwen