Being a young optimist with an unnaturally close relationship with the computers, I am usually quick to tout the powers of the internet: its ability to unite, level playing fields, etc.
But if you are in the mood to feed your darker emotions, the internet is frighteningly happy to help out. Between google, all the blogs it indexes, and flickr, photos and diary entries of People Who Are Better Than Youâ„¢ are always only a few clicks away.
I find myself spending the late late hours looking for photos of people who are prettier than me; skinnier than me, people who live active, social, healthy lives, girls kissing their boyfriends or dancing with drag queens at clubs; people at the beach with their friends, taking artful photographs of their youthful, beautiful selves; women who married the love of their lives, men remodelling kitchens, dogs sprinting around giant backyards full of squirrels and birds, women at conferences meeting other women with similar passions, a guy who can pull off a cool hat, a girl with a killer skirt, the list goes on and on…
There’s a story in Wilderness Tales I just finished a few days ago, in which a girl has an affair with her college professor. She falls in love, more or less, with the image he projects: he is brilliant, powerful, handsome, has a beautiful wife, kids, and a steady job. He has everything, and for some reason she wants her, and she finds this idea irresistable.
But they have an intimate relationship, and inevitably that means she sees his dark corners–his doubts, insecurities, etc. I mean, the guy is having an affair with his student, it’s not like he’s squared away. But as bits of the real him bleed through, she falls out of love, and is eventually repulsed by him. He comments on his love handles…
She doesn’t like him doing this. He’s not supposed to examine himself in mirrors or think about his appearance. Men are not supposed to.
So maybe this is a chink in my armor, this browsing the web and looking for envy. It’s not exactly a respectable activity. But this is a blog, and somehow I have the feeling that this generation is going to take this oversharing thing and just pound it into the ground. For all the openness of the 60s, our parents generation seems to have slid back into this culture where there is a really sharp divide between public and private life, and there are a whole host of things that are simply Not Acceptable to show to the outside world. Sodomy, for example.
But that’s really not the culture I want to live in. And so I post a little more on here than I am comfortable posting, and I post political opinions that might get me in trouble, because I want my kids to grow up in a world where these things are OK. If my kid is gay I don’t want him to spend a second thinking he is broken. And if he is feeling like he’s not good enough for some other reason, I want him to feel OK talking about it.
So I try a little bit to push this blog outside my comfort zone every now and then. Write me in 20 years and ask me if it worked.
I am off to go for a run to try and make myself feel prettier.
