um,
First of all, I love you. I am saying this to assuage the fear that some part of you feels. Correct me if I'm wrong, and if I am, I'll eat a bug, but there is probably some part of you that seeks companionship here?
I heard this lady on the radio who has received a MacArthur Foundation Grant (a.k.a. the MacArthur Genius Award) for her work. She teaches kindergarten, and that is where she gets the insights for her work. She said something like this:
If you had a class of thirty children and they each told a story, and each story went something like:
"There was this lonely deer in the forest, and a frog came along and said, 'Don't be sad, I'll be your friend!'" or,
"Once upon a time there was a little girl who was all alone, and then another little girl came along and they played together" then this class of kids would not hear the
fourth or fifth story and say "Hey! We've already heard this!"
Instead, they would say: "Tell us more! Tell us another one!" because this
is what children want us to tell them, that there will always be someone to
keep them company when they are lonely.
So. We have loneliness, we have the internet, we have everything, and here we both are. You are there and I am here, and we are playing together.
What I like about the internet is that it is a place where I can be beautiful and popular. I was not so successful at this in kindergarten, or through highschool, or college. Thank god that after highschool things chill out a bit; the ferocious exclusionary social force lessens, and you can get more credit for who you are on the inside. There is a weird internet beauty ethos; a different standard of beauty. I look at the If you could share a hammock with a fellow noder, who would it be? node and see the childlike (and I mean this as a compliment!) expressions of admiration, like, friendship, shy proto-love, and they are directed at people who are beautiful on everything. And there is a sort of sharing that happens here; people who are still contracted from social rejections in Kindergarten unfurl a bit, in this space where the normal standards of beauty do not apply.
And so I made this node because I am wondering, since we're all in our first few years of this strange new school, if we're going to repeat the errors of our past and start picking on people, now that we're all so beautiful? |
