Holly Selph

A Blip in the Universe, A Tweet in Time

 Photo by Rikki Osborne, used with permission.

I don’t Twitter. In fact, I so don’t Twitter that I just used Twitter as a verb instead of the more proper, “tweet.” I tried it twice, and I do have it set up so that my blog posts are automatically sent out via Twitter. I don’t, however, announce to my followers that I’m blow drying (blowing dry?) my hair or that I saw an ant carry off a crumb from my scone at Starbucks. I do not eat scones, either.

I do read the news, and I just learned that  www.blippy.com is the new Twitter. There, you can plug in your credit card information and each time you use it make a purchase, Blippy will tell all your furthest friends and closest strangers what you bought, where, and how much you paid.  

I already don’t care when even my most favorite people are drunk, tired, wearing a red bra, or frustrated with an Excel spreadsheet at work. Call me when you fall in love, you fall down the stairs, or you’re falling to pieces. Let’s keep it interesting. Not only do I not want to know what everyone else is buying, I don’t want you to know what I just bought. I recently purchased Falco’s “Rock Me Amadeus” on iTunes. I will offer this information willingly now, but if I were about to have it automatically broadcast to the Internet, I’d probably rethink my choice and buy something cooler, like an indie album by a band that doesn’t even exist yet. The act of observation changes the behavior of that which is being observed.

On the other hand, my friend, Rikki, is as much art as she is artist. If she updates her Facebook status, she doesn’t just tell you she’s eating French onion soup. She will tell you it tastes like lust feels. That’s information I need. If you just ordered lust for lunch, by all means, Tweet! And then pass the spoon. If she signed up for Blippy, her cataloged purchases would be things like superstition, the shadows of strangers, property on the moon, dark chocolate, and bourbon. Rikki can update her moments as they occur as far as I’m concerned. The other day, she sent a photo to my cell phone of a hand-painted sign on the side of the road that said, “Everything Will Be OK.” Again, this is information I need, because I wonder sometimes.

Instant information is good. I like instant. I'm impatient. I just reheated mashed potatoes in the microwave. It took one minute and thirty seconds. In other words, forever. With that much down time, I was able to respond to an email I had neglected for ten minutes. Because of the delay, Brittany sent a text to my phone from her Gmail account that said, “stop ignoring my email. beech.” Her reply to my reply reminded me that she’d be calling at 4:34 and that I’d better answer. That’s twenty minutes from present time. Some people might want you to know about all that will occur in those twenty minutes, but I’d be more inclined to savor my privacy and not release this information: 

Holly just poured a can of Sprite into a glass.

Holly doesn’t like ice in her Sprite because it waters down the carbonation.

Holly likes how carbonated drinks dance on her tongue.

Holly is planning on having three friends over for wine tonight.

Holly is listening to The Mountain Goats on her iPod.

Holly put a lot of black pepper on her mashed potatoes.

Holly is now full.

Holly falls in love, falls down, and falls to pieces several times a day.

Holly won't tell you everything, but will tell you at least that she actually does need to dry her hair before Brittany calls, that there’s an incomparable honesty that speaking of herself in the third person allows, and that for every time she does decide to announce where she is, what she is doing and with whom, how many dollars she spent and where, there are a thousand unanswered whys @TheUniverse RTworldpopulation  #everythingwillbeok? 

Dear Holly, I Never Existed. Your Friend, Fiction

My relationship with the Internet began around the same time I entered college. I was eighteen. I had a dial-up modem and AOL. I was a freshman studying English literature and creative writing and I was obsessed with my new ability to talk to strangers online. Equipped with a screen name and profile, I entered chat rooms, often with my astronomy classmate and fellow budding writer, Joie, and we'd entertain ourselves endlessly with answering age/sex/location instant messages. Chris Hanson wasn't yet compelling us to beware of who was on the other end of the type.

 

Then, I met Pammy. She was an Australian girl, about my age, living in Delaware as an au pair to two little girls. For a few years, we emailed pages to each other about our lives. She was a strong Christian who was struggling with her sexuality, as she had only had relationships with women. I was in a volatile relationship with a man for whom I'd lost most of my friends. We both had secrets we could only tell each other. In real life, we were required to keep up appearances. Her emails were detailed, almost Austenian. We maintained this friendship long enough that I saw her life unfold from lesbian girl struggling with her religious beliefs to a woman who eventually fell in love with the father of her host family after the mother died unexpectedly. Meanwhile, I left my boyfriend of five years and eventually became engaged to another. 

 

Yesterday, I was overcome with a need to paint. I found my brushes, easel, and canvases and searched through unpacked boxes for my acrylics. Instead, I found a box of old essays and papers from college. Inside was a file folder a few inches thick of Pammy's emails. I spent two hours rereading them. The last one was dated June, 2000, just before she was to marry a man 23 years her senior and become stepmother to the two girls she had been hired to help raise five years before. She explains that I might not hear from her for quite some time and ended with, "I am your friend and for the last time writing to you as the unmarried maiden named Miss Pamela N------." I never heard from her again. 

 

Naturally, ten years later and with the power of high speed wireless Internet access and Google, I searched for her. Did she end up marrying this man? What did the conservative townspeople in Lewes, DE think? Does she still speak to her former lover and friend, Vicki? Could she forsake her sexual orientation for a man she seemed to truly love? I needed the sequel. And, that's what I got.

 

"Pammy" never existed. She is a character in a novel I read as it was being written by a man whose "fiction draws on 18th-century models but tends to involve modern, astute characters, fanciful settings and surreal social conditions." (From his website, which I am not linking.)

 

Brilliant technique, huh? Find a member of your target audience and offer her pieces of a novel as if the character is real. He tossed in a few extras, commenting on the state of my life, relating to the struggles of taking on an overwhelming course load , often apologizing for being "too sermony" as Pammy and I had differing religious perspectives. I was always attempting to assuage her Christian guilt for her same-sex relationships, a fruitless pursuit.  After all, I was talking to an 18th century model living in modern social conditions.

 

I feel something between honored and victimized. I cared about this girl, which means that his writing was successful, but also that I spent a substantial amount of my young adulthood offering the energy of friendship when really I was just a focus group. 

 

I sent an email to the author. I don't expect that he will reply, though my tone was not admonishing. Actually, I hope for his success just like I hoped for hers. If someone eventually publishes Pammy's story, then she gets to exist after all. I'll be her silent, clandestine friend who lived on the other side of the screen, often in the middle of the night with a blanket around my shoulders, illuminated only by the light of the monitor, just as much a ghost as she was.

In These Economic Times, We Don't Need More Made-up Words: A Stimulus Package for Tweens

My friend, Brittany, and I talk too much. I don't mean we talk too much in general, although some people would argue differently. We talk too much to each other. If we plan to meet somewhere for conversation and a cocktail, we talk on the phone from point A to point B until we see each other, wave, say good bye and then greet each other anew. Last night, I felt like I'd missed an entire lifetime because I hadn't yet heard about her regular dental checkup (no cavities, but the wisdom teeth are coming out.) She leaves work at 4:30, and if I don't get a call by 4:34, a sense of unease sets in. The suspense of how many times she blinked and what she ordered for lunch is palpable. If she decides to head over to my place after work, she says, "take a shower and put on some clothes, I'm coming over." "Wait, how do you know I haven't showered?" I might ask. Silence. If I had showered, I would certainly have notified her of the event.

Lately, we've had an ongoing conversation about altered words people use when the original would generally suffice. For example, ridonkulous, which I just learned is actually spelled redonkulous. This irks me even more. I don't know where the donk came from or why it might imply that a thing is even more absurd than if merely dic, but I am ready to establish a petition to outlaw it even at the expense of freedom of speech, a right for which my regard is as high as, say, freedom to breathe. If you say redonkulous, be warned that I will make the following assumptions about you: 

1. You drink too much beer.

2. Not only do you drink too much beer, when you drink you still laugh at the Budweiser frogs and imitate them until something even better comes along (see below) 

3. You raised hell when news broke that Creed got back together because their tour is going to be "off the chain."

4.  After you receive a call on your Sidekick, the first question you ask your bro is, "where you at?" This is followed by ignoring the caller to engage the people you're entertaining with another round of, "Bud...Weis...Er" in order to exhibit how much fun you are having at the location where you are currently at.

5. No matter where you are, there are always “so many hot girls there, it's redonkulous”, even if it's just your roommate's girlfriend and her cousin from a place so remote that it can only be identified by county.

Next, Brittany and I discussed the use of "sexpert." This is slightly less annoying than redonkulous and has a different set of connotations. I realize that if one needs to refer to Dr. Drew, Dr. Ruth, or Susie Bright, it is cumbersome to say, "sex expert." The tongue is a lazy muscle that has priorities higher than speech, and sexologist sounds too much like someone went to college for a redonkulous amount of time. Sexpert is used so that people like Anderson Cooper (I'msorryIloveyou) and Larry King can feel hip. "Next on our show, we will be taking phone calls live with sexpert and former porn star, Annie Sprinkle!"

 Poof! Larry doesn't have a combover anymore.

The next one--and I blame Brody Jenner for this, although I think Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are its founding fathers--is bromance. Bromance is what occurs when heterosexual men who require a generous amount of product to maintain the vertical direction of their hair, share a camaraderie formerly known as friendship. If we were dudes, Brittany and I would be engaging in bromance. Instead, we're friends who don't need to defend our love with the use of slang that says, "we might bump chests and high five a lot, but we're not gay, we swear." 

This list could go on, but there are so many words underscored in red that this document is beginning to look like a crime scene, as if I murdered both Merriam and Webster. 

I try to be a tolerant friend. If you ate too much garlic and you want to talk closely to me, that's ok. We're cool. I got an app for that. If those jeans make you look like someone tattooed pockets on your ass, I'll be a pal and tell you that they must've shrunk in the wash. Just don't ask me to go so far as to say you look bootylicious. (Frighteningly, bootylicious is left unmarked by spell check. I'm starting to buy this 2012 stuff.) Should you have trouble discerning when to use lie or lay, I won’t correct you. I still don’t know which one it is I am doing under the sun in my tankini. 

Maybe it's not you. Maybe it's me. I just recall simpler times, when my only problems were yadda, yadda, yadda. If I am so uptight that I would consider unfriending someone over words that are unnecessary and not clever enough to delight me, then perhaps I need to loosen my tie a little, get with it, and chillax. 

For Andy, Who Would Have Known How to Ship This to His Forwarding Address

 

A few days ago I was lying awake in bed. It was about four in the morning. I was thinking of a friend and former coworker who was diagnosed with mesothelioma two years ago and given only months to live. Months passed, and even though the cancer was unresponsive to surgery and treatment, he kept living. In fact, the only thing he listed in his interest section on a popular social networking site was “living.” Most of us want more: to travel, to get rich, to eat exotic food, to write the next great American novel. Andy just wanted to live. For a thirty-three year old man, this doesn’t seem too much to ask.

Today I remembered that Andy kept me awake the other night, and so I went looking for him. He had started an online comic strip about living with terminal cancer and it was there that I learned that nine days ago, Andy died. Over a year has passed since I’ve had contact with him, and I missed him by nine days. 

Last time we spoke, I suggested we get together and do something fun. His energy was inconsistent, but he wanted to play video games, order pizza, you know, before he died.   So, I told him, “yes, let’s do that.” And then, my life went on. I moved to a bigger apartment. My husband and I separated. I went on dates. I fell in love. I moved to Arizona. I moved back to Georgia. I played video games, and ordered pizza, but I didn’t call Andy. Living was the last thing on my agenda. After all, as far as I’m concerned, it’s guaranteed. 

While I am often dissatisfied with this promise called life, I cling to it. It’s all I know. I know only these bones, the lines on my palms, the secret places I have freckles, that the knuckle on my right middle finger is larger than its counterpart on the left because I fractured it catching a football when I was thirteen. I know that my knees make a perfect table for my chin, and that my left wrist will need to be popped back into place every morning. I can predict how my breasts will change size throughout the month. I know how I taste and smell, which parts of me are lovely and which are asymmetrical.  I am all I know for sure, and I’m not quite even certain of that. I realize now with a fullness I can only compare to fruit or the sea, that I will die too. Andy certainly was on to something. The only interest we all should adopt is living.

I don’t know if Andy thought of me over the last year. I did think of him, but--and I just looked to be sure-- Andy was the sixth person to subscribe to this blog. When I post this, an email will be sent to him. Even though he will never receive it, I say these words for him:

Andy, you laughed a lot. Your laugh was so loud that it carried through the warehouse and into the office and when you laughed, we all would giggle in the boxes of our cubicles. Nothing, it seemed, could possibly be more funny than the very sound of you thinking something was funny.  l had to tell Michael today that you died and he says you have his Richard Pryor box set and he hopes it brought you joy. I told Michael that I bet you laughed that crazy laugh all the way through.  I bet your laugh is what kept you alive so long. 

I want to ask you things like, “what is it like to die? Does it hurt? Were you scared? Is the weather nice? Will I need an umbrella? Can I bring my own pillow?” But what I wish more is that I could have told you in life that you were good, Andy. I remember once you found out someone at work needed help with something...a medical bill for his child, I think. I don’t remember who or exactly what, but I do remember that you just went ahead and gave your whole paycheck. When word spread that you had been so extraordinarily generous, you were embarrassed and shrugged and said, “you can’t take it with you.” You didn’t know then that you would be leaving so soon.

Andy, you were right. You can’t take it with you. But you can leave it behind. You will be remembered for all that you gave, and didn’t take. You, in your millions of Nine Inch Nails t-shirts, with that crazy laugh and your moon-shaped heart, took care of us all.