Monday, April 2, 2012

REPOST from Chrissy Stockton

The Pros and Cons of GChat II

written by Chrissy Stockton, of the lovely philolzophers...originally seen here

We are having a conversation on gChat about our future. When we finally give up searching for Mr. and Mrs. Right, we say, we will meet together on the coast and build a house. “It has to have a record player,” you say. I tell you about chopping wood, how it is cathartic and makes you feel like you have earned your keep as a human being. We’ll have a wood burning stove, you say. There will be a part of our porch with no roof, so we can lay there and watch all the stars we missed by spending all our youth in cities. Mornings, we’ll drink coffee and read. We will bind our own anthologies of things we like: poems, old letters and stories about things we have done.

There are things that are understood in this conversation that would be hard to address directly so we talk as if we are making a Plan B. What I am trying not to say is that when you talk I feel uneasy. It took me a long time to talk myself down into reality where I understand that men are not sensitive creatures who want to talk about The Meaning of Life endlessly. I’m going to ignore the evidence to the contrary lest I actually have to stop dating indefinitely until I can find one of these elusive hybrids.

In this world there is room for two people who notice everything and grieve over the mortality of insects. There is room for more, but they’re rare enough to not be found by chance. Maybe it’s just myopia. Maybe we aren’t deeper than anyone else, maybe they’ve just learned to let go of the weight we are carrying around. Isn’t a simpler explanation more likely to be correct? But I feel like Atlas sometimes because I’m trying to hold my world up by myself and expose just the parts that I think people want to deal with and can relate to.

I don’t want you to feel lonely. It’s in my favorite Mary Oliver poem when she talks about having to carry this kind of weight. You don’t have to, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

It’s embarrassing to be human sometimes and be at the mercy of embodied cravings and emotions that can go wherever.

The pros and cons of gChat is talking to someone that doesn’t make me feel like an alien about it. What our generation lacks in attention span it makes up for in disbarring physical proximity as the determining factor in who you get to have conversations with.