I think I have it in me to be a stalker. Not that I would, mind you, but the potential is there. I get fixated on people–almost at random, it sometimes seems. Or, rather, I get fixated on my idea of them. This happens mostly online. Facebook, Twitter. Formerly Myspace. Before that, Friendster.
Thanks to Facebook, I know that Rock Star Ex Boyfriend just left a comment on an old photo posted by a mutual friend. Why do I need to know this? And yet, there’s that little pleasure in looking in, in seeing evidence that he’s still moving through the world. I know that at 11:57 a.m. EST, he was sitting at a computer, looking at Angie’s Facebook photos. And maybe he was doing that because he was remembering that summer when we were sixteen, when we all met. And so then maybe he’s remembering me, too, just a little. And maybe that’s the truth of it right there. Maybe all I’m looking for is evidence that the old connections hold, however tenuously.
But I’m not fixated on Rock Star Ex Boyfriend right now. That was 2002. Then I wrote a short story about him (and freaked him out in a series of neurotic emails, but he will not admit to having been freaked out) and that cured that.
Right now I’m somewhat fixated on a total stranger, thanks to his ridiculously charming tweets. Ah Twitter. I’m spending entirely too much energy reading John Roderick’s tweets. After a few days last month when I went at least one reply past the border of acceptable and on into creepy-attentive, I had to forbid myself from replying to him. Now that I won’t reply, the interest is starting to fade, though. I guess I’m the kind of stalker who isn’t satisfied just watching. I need you to know I can see you. I’m not sure I want to look too deeply into that.
But then there are the total strangers who I have no interest in connecting with. I just want to collect enough evidence to invent lives for them. A guy who works at New Seasons walks past our house every day on his way to and from work. I see him walking, I see him in the store. Thanks to Facebook, I also know what he looks like in a corset. I found him while doing a search of New Seasons employees because I was looking for this guy (without luck). I see the produce guy in the store still, but I haven’t seen that girl since, and I wonder what happened between them, if I was witness to the end of something. It’s none of my business. I have no right to know. But I go looking for it anyway. I’d like to flatter myself by thinking my curiosity comes from compassion, but the truth is they’ll probably end up in a novel one of these days.
Mostly I think it comes down to the shape of my life as a mother. My life exists almost entirely in the three square miles marked out by our house, New Seasons, Thumper’s playgroup, and the café where I go to write on Sundays. That small square, and then the vast Internet. The people at the supermarket take on an outsized importance in my day, as do the other families at playgroup, and the counter staff at the café, because they are the people I see the most. I want to see the new photos the Solutions Desk guy in the corset posts of his toddler. I want to know what happened between the produce guy and the blond. They are the inhabitants of my shrunken world, and for that reason alone they matter to me.
As Rock Star Ex Boyfriend inhabits my long-lost past, which is constantly expanding backward, stretching out into some giddy cloud of euphoric recall. If Rock Star Ex Boyfriend is still moving through the world, still sitting down in front of a computer, and I have evidence of that, then I have evidence that I was once sixteen and in love with a boy who played guitar. As long as he’s still out there, that isn’t lost to me.
Which is ridiculous to me, as I type it, but there it is.
It’s such a lonely thing sometimes, motherhood. Do I need to say I treasure it, and wouldn’t trade it for anything? Because that’s true, too. But I miss who I was, not just nineteen years ago, but ten years ago, five, three… I miss my friends. I miss the freedom. I miss the music. I miss being 22 and single in my teensy studio apartment on St. Marks Place, getting ready to go out to hear a friend’s band play, wondering who’ll be there, wondering if there’ll be a new boy to kiss. (And that particular friend is now a rock star, too, and I wonder what he misses about the days when he could walk anonymously through the streets. I should ask him.)
Yes, yes, yes, I love where I am now. And you love where you are now, too. Let’s agree on that and move past it. Admit it. If you could go back to the responsibility-free days for just one day…okay…maybe a weekend… If you could go back in time for just one weekend, when and where would that be? And what would you do?
Me? I’m going to twenty-two years old, summer of ’95, the East Village. Gonna go see a rock show. Gonna go kiss some boy. No, I don’t want to know his name.
Oh. Yes.
I hate the idea of having to do it all over again, but a vacation in my own past? There’s something appealing about that.
i’d probably go back to just after i dropped out of college (97ish) to when i met that boy and we got along great. he left on a roadtrip planned before we met and then i emailed him every day and kindof went compulsive on him and why wasn’t he responding to my every letter?? (well you could only check email every so often on the road in the days before wireless.) needless to say it didn’t end the way it should/could have- with me not sounding like a crazy stalker. ah well. live and learn.
What is it about the casual internet tweet, blog, or status update that often causes one to reminiscence about some real-life interaction? It happens to me at least.
Maybe it doesn’t happen to everyone. Perhaps others, younger others that is, are reminded by a bold tweet of that raucous chat room fellow from the AOL days, or a strident blog post recalls an email exchange from someone who is now nothing but a memory and a NDR.
Makes me wonder how it changes our perceptions to have instantaneous status updates as compared to a weekly letter or even a daily phone call.
Loved this post. It sparked off a lot of thoughts.
Thank you Cari, you have written about my life too! Motherhood does isolate you, and although most of the time its great, there are days were I feel like I would like to go back to my old life, do what I want when I want.
Thank you for making me feel like I’m not the only one that is living like this, in my own bubble, watching ‘real’ people live their lives on the internet!
I’m going back to being oh, about 8 years old, to spend a weekend at my grondmother’s house. Being tucked in by her so tightly that the mattress becomes a “boat”, listening to the alarm clock with the glow-in-the-dark clockface. And during the day using her famous and enormous collection of fabric scraps to make clothes for my dolls, while sitting on her smooth, buttery hardwood floor.
Eating my grandfather’s oatmeal and playing a game of Memory at their wobbly table in the afternoon.
I miss that.
I totally want to know about the produce guy too and I’ve never even seen him or been to your city. So I’m like a stalker once removed or something.
I don’t think I would like to go back to anything. If I had to I would go back to a Labor Day weekend spent on Block Island with friends. The water was unusually warm and we swam setting off the phosphorescent algae at midnight.
Pssh, I just did that yesterday! Hooray for arrested development!
(OK, well, not ALL of it. Some of it, though.)
But this is to say…when I think about it, this right here is pretty much where I want to be. Sure, there are things I want to happen in the relatively near future, but I also want the future to hold off just a little bit longer… because I haven’t had this much FUN in a really really really long time and I am DUE, man.
mwah. love the way you write, lady. and the way that you’ve now touched off in me an afternoon’s-long daydream wondering what happened to a boy i used to kiss on a dock on a lake under the moon a very, very long time ago.
I consider my moments of mind wandering and life story of strangers creating I do to be my creative retreats during an otherwise FULL day. Really, for me, it’s about escaping from the reality of what must be for those people (and for what certainly is for me) – so I create lies about them to entertain myself.
Like the guy who lives at the nursing home down the street from me. The guy who flips me off every time I wave at him (which is every day I drive anywhere). He’s always outside, and he’s always flipping people off. I have all sorts of ideas about him.
I’m chasing an almost 3-year-old and an almost 1-year-old. I know you wouldn’t be anywhere but with your Thumper. You shouldn’t feel a need to say that “out loud” to the internet.
I’ve been quietly reading your blog for a while… 🙂 (Was that scary-stalkerish?)
But I had to say that I’m glad other people like to investigate strangers, too. It’s interesting, and, I think, good. We’re this giant, interconnected mass– and have been since even before the Internet. Look at James Joyce’s stuff–it always made me feel like I was delving into strangers lives, too.
There’s my stalker-thought. Now I’ll recede back into the recesses of the Internet…
I would go back to 1981/82 NYC, East Village and have more of the same fun as I had back then when I was 16. This time I wouldn’t worry so much about whether other people thought I was cool.
I would go back to highschool to the highschool love of my life (not my hubby, who is the real love of my life). there is this day I remember in highschool boy’s bedroom listening to a billy joel song over and over again. Sigh. I wouldn’t trade that for now, but being 16 for a day would be nice.
ooo. this post really made me think and dream. I would love to vacation in my past, especially knowing what I know now. I’d go back to my final year of high school – we had so much fun, we were so free, we had so much to discover. I’m glad I discovered it, but I’d sure like to live it all over again…
I love all these shades of gray/realness/unrealness. Just what I needed to read today.
Oh my gosh, you’ve so hit me where I live, with all this benign cyberstalking and curiosity about the lives of peripheral people run amok! I want to see the guy in the corset!
Thank you for queuing up some thoughts. Ahhh.. Facebook. It’s been a treasure and a bane for my late night sleepless hours. Reweaving connections, wondering about some of the ‘friends’ who contact me who I totally cannot recall. They remember me, they remember things we did and yet they remain ghosts to me, whispers of memories. And then, knowing there is balance in the universe, I know that I am a ghost of a memory to someone else who I remember vividly. It gets you wondering about the tenacity of even small threads of connection, woven, knitted together.
For some friends, we’ve moved it off Facebook, rekindled a friendship, exchange emails or calls. That feels good. That feels like cultivating more in my life. Sometimes though, it’s just stalking. Who is visiting where and why. Who is up all night like me. It’s white noise filling the empty spaces ….
… and like you, I attribute my empty spaces to being the FT mom. It’s one of the coolest jobs I’ve ever had, but my regular live face-to-face interaction is with the lady at the organic market, the co-op teachers, and some other moms for a few minutes. Weekly I see family and monthly, maybe a knitting circle or a playgroup with other kids. The days are full and fulfilling, but the diversity of conversation isn’t what it once was. The internet is my surrogate for late nite pizza/beer fueled talks until 2 am or road-trips or ridiculous Rummy games or any of the (now-inaccessible) means I once had for long meandering thoughts with friends.
I don’t think it’s entirely the isolation of motherhood that causes it; I think in part it’s just our age. There’s definitely something in people that kicks in around or soon after 35, a deeper sense of our ageing that allows the wisps of nostalgia to creep into our minds. It manifested in our parents generation in the annoying habit of fixating on those “music of your life” radio stations and ignoring the music that came after. For us, in our new world of online social networking, it manifests in this tendency to sit up late at night searching the same nearly-forgotten names over and over, looking for momentary connections to our lost past.
This may make me officially an old person but I think the time I would revisit would be the summer of 97, when I was 26, when I lived in a tiny upstairs apartment with sloped ceilings and a wee dormer windowed closet for a bedroom. It was a time when Peter and I could have sex all afternoon and then lie there afterward talking, about art, literature, politics, the Russian revolution, you name it. All without having to worry about the kids hearing (because his kids lived with their mom back then, now they live with us), about having to wake up early, about this damned crick in my neck. . .
I also am burning to know the story of the produce man and his lost love.
I love the idea of vacationing in the past.
I have been reading your blog for ages and only begun commenting somewhat recently!
I think there are a lot of us out here – not-moms as well as moms – who feel a little isolated, a little disconnected at times. I think it is, as Jodi said, partly a function of age (I turn 40 the end of February. How did that happen?)
When you’re a kid or even a college student, making friends is comparatively easy – I actually remember one of my best high school friends and I, we hit it off one day standing outside waiting for Biology class, and at the end of the conversation I was like, “Hey, you’re cool. Want to be friends?” and she was like “Yeah, that sounds good.” And we were (and still are) friends.
But as you get older, so much crap gets in the way – jobs, baggage from old relationships, political beliefs, whatever.
I feel somedays like my life is a little hamster wheel – that I go from work to church to the grocery store and back home, all within a 5 mile radius. And some days I almost forget what day of the week it is, from the sameness.
And I don’t have any real “running around” friends any more. My colleagues are friend-like, but they go home (as I do) at the end of the day and we don’t really socialize after 5 pm. And a lot of the people I know from the various groups I’m in have other stuff and other responsibilities and the few times I’ve called people and tried to arrange going out to lunch (even), schedules are such an issue.
I think it’s partly the result of how our society is now. Everyone is so busy. The people who work “for someone” (as opposed to working for someone else) are scared about their jobs. People develop funny quirks and “issues.”
I don’t know how to fix it; if I did, I’d have those friends I could call up on a Saturday morning and go, “Hey, want to go antiquing today?” and they’d be like, “Ok, that’s cool, just let me see if I can park the kids with their dad” or something like that.
D’oh. The sentence “The people who work “for someone….” should have the parenthesis of “(as opposed to being self-employed)” not what I wrote.
Stupid brain gets ahead of my stupid fingers.
I would go back to my early 20s, when I used to regularly fly across Canada, stop in Alberta to visit family and pick up a train from Edmonton or Calgary through the Rocky Mountains to Vancouver. Coach fare, no sleeping berth. Up most of the night in the observation car, watching the lights and the mountains, talking for hours with total strangers, playing cards with older people. I loved it so much, the feeling of not needing very much sleep because I had nothing to do the next day but arrive in town, visit friends and sleep in their spare bed while they were at work.
And actually, I don’t love where I am right now.
I am not a mother, but I got a big dose of how loneliness must feel one day when I took care of my best friend’s tiny year-old guy for an afternoon while she had office meetings – I took him out in his stroller, he smiled and babbled to people who passed by, who smiled and giggled back at him. And they ignored me completely. By the time we got back to Mummy, I felt very disoriented and a little sad. It was awful. 🙁
You said it so well in this post.
I think I’d go back to the spring of 91– the end of college. I miss living with my very best friends and having no responsibilities beyond going to class and showing up to my waitressing job. There was such a thrill in the possibilities of what might happen on any given night uptown. I loved getting ready to go out. The music in the apartment blared, the beers popped and the air smelled like teen spirit.
truth? new york too. thursday nights with my friend sara when we would meet up at the st mark’s bar for cheap pints of blue moon and hang with the bike messenger friends of hers. i saw one guy, kevin, on ellen a few years ago and laughed because he looked exactly the same and i was lying in bed pregnant with twins, unable to go anywhere, thinking he was probably still drinking pints somewhere in the city.
good days, then. free but bound, using my long distance boyfriend to keep them at bay, but flirting furiously because i was lonely and i could.
i love your fascination with others. it is great fodder for thought and story telling.
Young motherhood is a lonely time, at least in our culture.
In the fall, especially, I miss the start of a new school year, new clothes, new things to learn, new people to meet, an optimistic and exciting sense of space – the future me who could be anything, anywhere. Every choice we make in our lives closes down all the other roads we could have taken. So that by my age, my life has taken a certain immutable shape with few potentials left. I think about this all the time. Yet, I’m happier and more content than I ever was before.
two moments:
just graduated college, actually working as a dancer (modern, usually wearing clothing of some sort) party in a loft somewhere downtown nyc, dancing with that guy who was going somewhere in another company, feeling free and excited and the possibilities were endless….
and then there was that summer, probably freshman year college, on the boat with my father and sister, off the coast of maine, ran into my heartthrob from HS who had been flirting on and off with madly for years, and then there he is, picking me up in his boston whaler, taking me back to his familys summer house where there was much smoking of cigarettes and drinking and flirting, and then some making out, but chickened out and didn’t have sex, and why the hell didn’t i?
great post!
it’s this whole new crazy world now, where everyone we meet stays a little in our lives for the entire rest of them! I think, one day, this will lead to very crowded funerals…does that make me morbid, associating friendship and funerals? I wonder…
-Caf xoxo
I was in love with a guy who played guitar (and who broke my heart). If I were honest, I’m still in love with him. And if I could have back a moment, it would be one of my trips down to see him, while I was still in college. Maybe the time I drove down and surprised him for the weekend and we spent a large portion of the night making out and talking, and the next morning I had to get up early to make it back to Sacramento to pick up my friend and head home. I don’t really admit it much to people in my real life, but I miss him. And I miss the feeling of magic in those few hours, when he loved me more than anything in the world. Oh yeah, and I wasn’t really an adult yet!
I look him up on Facebook (even though neither of us has made a move to be “friends”) to see who is in his picture with him.
Your post made me almost friend you on Facebook. Then I felt like that was too stalkerish. 🙂
Cari, don’t you think some of this is from being a novelist? It’s that need to create story, to find story in every moment, to imagine all the possibilities…
Oh you’ve been walking around in my head. A lot. They’re the exact same thoughts I have. A lot.
date time?
September 1991 around 10pm. If I’d changed one sentance, my whole life could [stress, could] have been altogether different. I will forever regret the sentance I did utter. And forever wonder what could have happened if I had said what I now wish I had said and let opportunity take a chance.
September 1997, on Red Islet, a tiny island off a small island near Saltspring Island. We kayaked for a week without talking to anyone else, only seeing other people as tiny specks on other shores of other islands. It was when I really knew that I loved the guy I would later marry. It was evening, we were watching the sun set across our little shell beach, like we were the only people on earth. I felt like I was going to rise off the ground and fly away.
It is so interesting to read how many of us have similar thoughts. Being fascinated with the lives of strangers. I always wonder about a family across from us who never seem to buy groceries or cook but only carry Big Gulp cups from 7-Eleven. But they are very active Boy-Girl Scouts…
Or the nurse who lives right above them, cleans at the weirdest hours and never combs her hair, and has a mini camera installed that actually is directly pointed at my patio…(now that I think of it ..?) I wonder what people think about us (yelling at the dogs too many times) – are we a weird family to them?
And I agree, everyone is too busy nowadays, it could be the age, but the internet surely has brought me back together with friends who now live far away. S
I found your writings comforting. I often get lost in remembering the past feeling torn from what my life once was. I miss the adventure . Mostly I miss a girlfriend in yellowknife that I walked away from when I left the N.W.T. We were both so lost then