Laura’s been meaning to brant but as always, life has gotten in the way. There’s been car trouble, and snow storms, and on top of everything else, there was myspace, which Laura got kind of addicted to and has just stopped herself from looking for still more friends on. Being 44 and limited in her ability to truly understand The New Technology, she’s sort of confused about what the purpose of myspace actually is. Her sister-in-law, Colleen, also 44, has tried to explain it to Laura many times — in fact, she was the one who told Laura she “had” to have “a presence” on myspace and hooked her up with this guy less than half their age who put her page together for “The Good Stuff”. So Laura emailed him (Colleen always knows the best people to hire. More than that, Laura has always thought, Colleen always knows that it’s possible to hire someone to do the thing you can’t or don’t know how or don’t want to do, whereas Laura would never know that you can hire almost anyone to do anything.)
Anyway, Colleen’s been trying to explain to Laura that myspace is all about “social networking,” but when Laura asks Colleen what that means, Laura notices a really long silence just like when Colleen drives through a tunnel or turns on to a really small country road in Upstate New York where she lives. Of course, the silence Laura hears is not the sound of The New Technology — Colleen’s cell phone — malfunctioning. It is the sound of one 44 year old woman trying to save face instead of breaking down and admitting that she, too, has no idea what the hell that unintelligible mess of myspace is all about.
Regardless of Colleen and Laura’s combined middle-aged ignorance on topics such as this one, Laura began to “have a presence” on myspace about two weeks ago (or maybe it’s three). She quickly realized that it was already taking up a huge amount of time and had all the earmarks of a possible new compulsion given 1) how many times a days she started checking to see if there were any new “friend” requests and 2) managing her disappointment and her hurt and her sadness and her loneliness and her sense of hopeless isolation when there are no new “friend” requests.
Actually, to be completely frank and to provide full disclosure, Laura was first introduced to the bizarreness of myspace two years ago when her stepdaughter Sarah came to visit from Denver. Sarah, then 13, was in the throes of her obsession with myspace and was constantly checking her page and reading comments from her friends and then answering them until all hours of the night. Sarah tried to explain it to Laura — and she was really quite patient about it — but of course Laura didn’t understand a word she said. Being desperate for Sarah’s approval, of course, and wanting Sarah to think she was cool, Laura actually made a myspace page — “Dr. Freud” is what she called her myspace persona which was illustrated not with a photo of Laura herself but with a picture of a Chia Pet “Scooby Doo.” Needless to say, Laura’s early experience with myspace never quite caught on with Sarah, and so very quickly she forgot all about her Chia Pet “Scooby Doo” and her tag line — “Desperate to Be Liked By Teenagers.”
But back to the present. Like so many other new and modern things she doesn’t understand, Laura tries to imagine what it would have been like if myspace had been around when she was in junior high school or high school — whether she would have spent hours and hours of her day posting her favorite bands (”The Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, Joni Mitchell, Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin”), her favorite hobbies (”smoking, shopliftinging, and drinking out in the woods before school dances from Skippy jars filled with purloined gin or vodka and then mixed with Mountain Dew!”), and her biggest dream (”to become a mime and study with Marcel Marceau in Paris”). <---(Not a joke.) Would she and her best friend Jenny have been constantly posting comments on each other’s pages? Would they have been able to far more easily trade the items they’d each shoplifted during a long fruitful Saturday of shoplifting in Harvard Square? And, most importantly, would they have been able to purloin more gin and vodka from their parents’ liquor cabinets and/or arrange for “friends” to buy them beer (since they were minors) and cigarettes just by posting comments and trolling for “friends” in their “extended networks”?
Having thought about it in those terms, Laura is now certain that she would have been a complete myspace freak and would not only have searched for people like herself (were there people like herself then and are there people like herself now?), but would have also definitely posted tons and tons of her deeply depressed poetry that she wrote all the time back then to describe and document the depths of her adolescent misery.
Unfortunately, despite her new found compassionate “understanding” of why people are drawn to online “social networking” (as opposed to understanding exactly how, in technical terms, this online “social networking” works), Laura still isn’t sure myspace is where she should be spending a lot of her time and self-promotional efforts. Especially since her time on myspace was definitely infringing on — and, to be frank, replacing altogether — her branting time.
That said, Laura would like to say that she has had several incredibly nice email exchanges with new myspace friends — readers who Laura searched for who were fans of her books, and also authors Laura has admired over the years and has now exchanged nice notes with.
Feel free to check out Laura’s visually busy dizzingly nauseating seizure-inducing myspace page — www.myspace.com/laurazigman — and ask her to be your friend!
