I enjoyed LiveJournal because sometimes I have fragments of ideas which are not ready to be an official article, but it is nice to be able to start giving the words shape. I also felt like I could actually get to know people on there. Like, if I met someone at a rock show, we could exchange info and continue getting to know one another. I was extremely bugged, however, when I started seeing people out at night and I’d ask them how they were and be told to read their LJ. Why bother leaving the house if you refuse to have a conversation? Over time, people started taking LJ more and more seriously. This meant that, first of all, that, if I complained about work on there, some dick would take it as uber-personally and big deal as if I had sent out a press release and posted “I had a hard day because blah blah” to every high traffic site I operate. Secondly, there started to be too many people on my LJ list for me to keep up with what everyone was up to. Most disappointingly, treating LJ as a publishing platform rather than a diary meant that other people started writing less and less personal entries and more and more press release-like entries which had more to do with how they wish to be perceived than who they truly are.

At first, I hated MySpace because it seemed like a service whose only application was to allow other people access to my Rolodex without having to say “thanks for the introduction”. Then I also hated MySpace because it seemed to pull audience from LJ, which I had enjoyed the interactivity of, and MySpace didn’t really seem to have any way to get to know people. MySpace is like this menu of people who seem like, in another life, I might have really enjoyed knowing them, but MySpace gives just enough of a taste to feel weird about people, without really enough to know them at all. Partly, MySpace is so terribly public that one really ought to keep anything private off there, but this means that there are always aspects of a person left off there which would be important to know if you were truly meeting them. And, if you are forthcoming with someone who has a popular MySpace account, you can’t trust that they will know to keep private things private, libel laws or no. Who wants to spend all their time in legal battles? It is easier to just be really private and closed off. I hired people to handle my MySpace accounts for me because MySpace filled me with such a deep keening sense of loneliness. There are certain sorts of MySpace messages, I enjoy answering personally. (If you got a message with my name signed to it, I wrote it.) For the most part, though, every time I’ve thought a Los Angeles person I met on there seemed like someone I’d want to know, they ended up digitally booty-calling me. Part of me thinks I should be flattered by this, as I generally am motivated to converse with people who are accomplished, intelligent, talented, creative, famous, etc. But it just makes me ache inside. Do human beings no longer meet in person for anything besides sex?

Then, one of the years I spoke at SXSW, the big interactive launch of the season was Twitter. Everyone was all a-twitter over this new ADD version of LiveJournal. Instead of having to read long transcripts of arguments someone had with their mom or extensive deconstructions of the merits of macaroni with and without cheese, Twitter only leaves room for 140 characters in a post. If you have a Blackberry or an iPhone or similar cell phone, it is easy to update your Twitter even while driving in traffic. (Not that I recommend this, as I’m pretty sure it might be illegal or dangerous or something most places.) Because of the SXSW launch and general tech community culture driving the initial Twitter world, I had mostly people I knew from that part of my life on my read list and I felt like I actually was getting to know some interesting and accomplished people a bit better on there, seeing cool links as news broke, and generally getting to enjoy a new Web 2.0 property. I’m not sure if there was a panel at the recent adult trade shows in Vegas where everyone was told that Twitter is great for interacting with fans or getting traffic or what, but I’ve recently had a couple hundred new people add me to their Twitter follow lists. Although early on, I just had my assistant add back all new follows on Twitter and I’d just remove the boring or annoying ones later, I now prefer to check out each new follow personally. This means that now, when I think of posting what delicious things I am consuming for breakfast (iced soy latte and smoked salmon on low salt sprouted grain bread), I feel guilty like I should really get on checking out all those new accounts which have expressed interest by following my account. Only then I have to wonder how many followed my Twitter because they are interested in me and how many followed because they want me to be interested in them? And, of course, I recently got to discover that 140 characters is not too few for someone to start drama, but it is too few to explain one’s point diplomatically enough to get them to chill.

Although I was an early adopter on Twitter, I came to Facebook late. Partly it had trouble with my name and partly I had to get alumni email stuff set up for it to be useful in finding former classmates. Plus the places in Germany, Belgium, Israel, and Switzerland where I went to school in my teen years were not listed and the system seemed to be set up for fewer high schools. Facebook tech support is impressively by far the most responsible and effective of any of the social networking sites and I eventually did get an account properly set up there. On Facebook, I used a different rule of thumb for friending people or approved friend requests: I only wanted friends on there who I would deliberately have a meal or a tasty beverage with. If the person is someone I’d be pleased to get a dinner or drinks invite from or a person I’d be likely to extend a dinner or drinks invite to, then I’d approve them. If the person is just someone who would like me to take their photo or who would only be interested in dining with me if I brought important (to them) or fuckable (by them) people with me, then that would be a no. I find it unfortunate that my morbid college friends can’t shut up about my two friends from that time period who died tragically. If the deaths of those two people saddens my living friends half as much as me, I’d expect they would want to think about it a bit less often than daily. My Facebook friend add process is slow because when a new person adds me who I want to add back, I like to write a personal note to them and I do keep up with my friends status feeds and such. I update my own Facebook status with Twitter and import notes from my LiveJournal, so my Facebook friends probably get a mildly more complete view. But tonight, I logged onto Facebook thinking that maybe I would do something sociable and just felt a wave of social anxiety. Although there are five or six pending requests on there I was really really looking forward to approving and interacting with, there were also a hundred I was kind of stumped by. Lots of women I’ve known have naturally changed their names. Lots of people I’ve known by fannish names or punk rock nicknames and I don’t recall what their mamma called them, even if I knew once. Remembering multiple names for every person becomes really hard once one has met enough people. I recognized some of the add requests as people I’ve photographed but don’t know and some as people who dated friends of friends of friends or who were otherwise tangentially part of social groups I was in. Not people I dislike at all, but not all people I’d be inclined to hang with if I were in town for a weekend or vice-versa. Some people ring a bell and I agonize over where I know them from, but don’t want to offend by asking. My time is so limited that I’d really like to have just one social platform where everyone on my list is someone who might actually care if I had a death in the family. Or at least enjoy getting coffee with me on a good day.

Actually, although I still minimally participate in LiveJournal, MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook, I find that, for me, all the new Web 2.0 modes of interaction feel great for a few months and then feel kinda ache-inducing. If I’m so connected, why do I feel so disconnected? The only web interaction sites which tend to consistently be enjoyable for me are forums. This is why it is so important to me that the BlueBlod.net boards be a place where people from varied backgrounds can exchange different viewpoints in an intelligent and real way, without tonal BS bulletpoints, without flame wars, without being unable to back up what they say.

But, every once in a while, it just all fills me with such a deep keening sense of loneliness, I pine for the days when I used to just drop by friends’ houses and vice-versa, when it felt worth getting dressed up to go out, whether or not photos would be taken. I realize this is the internet age equivalent of longing for the times when people dressed up to go visit the town square. I remember my grandparents talking about country clubs taking the place of the town square or something along those lines that a child’s mind couldn’t quite grasp. A country club is too geographically local for today’s mobile world, though. I wish I could take a year off and just travel and write and eat right and visit people from different times in my life and different areas of my interests and see who I really connect or re-connect with and who is just a pleasant memory. The country club of Web 2.0 is just simultaneously overwhelming with the constant clamor of thousands of apparently potential friends and lonely with lack of anything real enough to feel . . . well, real.

A long long time ago, in a land far far from here, I found myself in abrupt need of a place to live. After approximately five years in Connecticut, my parents convinced my lovelorn and underemployed self that I should come stay with them for a while in part of Northern Virginia which is really a suburb of Washington, DC. I think they maybe thought I would get into some kind of government work, which, in a way, I eventually did for a while. But one of the problems with being a prodigy is that you are never quite on the same playing field as everyone else. I graduated from college without being legal to drink in America. When I got to the DC area, I thought I might apply to work for the FBI. I liked the idea of a job which required intelligence and education, which also involved learning how to use all sorts of weaponry and getting paid to stay fit. Only I did not meet their minimum age requirement. I signed up to take the GMAT for entrance to business school, but my father was pissy that day and wouldn’t drive me. After getting into an accident years prior, I was not on their insurance, so I couldn’t drive myself. I often wonder how different my life would be now if I had just figured out how to put together the seventy bucks or whatever a cab would have been and taken the test. It hadn’t seemed like the sort of activity I could have asked a friend to help with in the early morning.

The sort of activity I could get a ride to was generally a science fiction convention or a punk show. There was a guy named Steve who I met at a con and got to know largely because he lived in the same area as my parents and was willing to drive me places like that. He and I always had a great time together out on the town and quickly became friends for real. So, when my parents abruptly suggested I move within the next day, he was who I called to help me. I was nursing a terrible cold with the hope of getting entirely well in time for a New Years con. My mom had received word that she would be stationed in Brazil and a snot-spewing daughter with an inappropriate wardrobe and funny-colored hair seemed like it might be nonideal adornment for selling their house. It probably didn’t help that, because they had taught me to be unashamed, I never thought to hide my inappropriate reading material kept in shelves in the garage. I think my dad had decided not to buy some house, partly because they’d had a kid around my age lying around in a way he found unappealing. To this day, although I am close with my parents, I do not know if they actually intended me to get out of their house in 24 hours or if they simply lacked the faith that I could meet a reasonable deadline. They certainly offered me extra time when Steve and I were clearly going to manage to get all my stuff into storage within the day. I was blowing my nose with one hand and packing boxes with the other, but we made it. Steve and I made it to the New Years festivities too.

So I went to sleep on the living room couch at Steve’s place and we set about looking for a great house to live in. It was surprisingly difficult to find a place which would rent anything decent to unrelated individuals. As time dragged on without us finding a place, my friend Johnny gave me a room he was sort of renting to stay in. I say sort of renting because he had agreed to live there but decided he wasn’t really nuts about who his housemates would be and the location was kind of far out from the city. So he had paid without moving in. My friend Julia from college was paying rent on a super-expensive place in Washington, DC proper and found herself suffering trying to afford it. Even though all four of us were gainfully employed, we found that most landlords in the area would not even show places to unrelated groups of people. It seemed to me that what was functionally a four income family ought to have been a better bet for landlords than a single income one with kids, but people who owned rental properties did not see it my way.

So, like the main characters in the BBC America show Spaced, the four of us eventually pretended that I was engaged to Steve and my cousin Julia was engaged to Johnny and we were serious couples. I don’t recall exactly how Julia and I were supposed to be related, but, after coming up with this egregious fiction, we quickly found a spacious and easily affordable townhouse. Best of all, the landlord was a futurist who, for sexually harassing the previous tenants, had been court-ordered not to visit his own properties.

If you have not seen the incredibly entertaining BBC comedy Spaced yet, I deeply suggest that you rectify the situation. Blue Blood readers are probably all familiar with actor/writer Simon Pegg from Shaun of the Dead. Simon Pegg and actor/writer Jessica Hynes together created Spaced. In fact, Simon Pegg got the idea for Shaun of the Dead while working on an episode of Spaced where his character plays a zombie-killing video game. Simon Pegg has described the Spaced show as “a cross between The Simpsons, The X-Files, and Northern Exposure.” Despite numerological references to the X-Files and a lot of pop culture references in general, the show most reminded me of a more realistic, modern version of The Young Ones.

The basic storyline revolves around comic book store assistant manager and aspiring artist Tim Bisley, played by Simon Pegg, and perennially fired employee and aspiring writer Daisy Steiner, played by Jessica Hynes. The two of them meet in a coffeehouse, read the housing listings together, and eventually pose as a professional couple in order to get approved for a lease on a comfy apartment at a great price. Their new place is ninety pounds a week. (In current dollar terms, I think the conversion rate would place this price at around $33,000 monthly, but the show first aired in 1999.) Their new home comes with the tortured artist Brian downstairs and the lonely boozy landlord Marsha upstairs. There are frequent appearances from Tim Bisley’s best friend Mike, a military fanboy and aspiring soldier, and Daisy’s best friend Twist, a dry cleaner clerk and aspiring fashion designer. Bike messenger and night club king Tyres bicycles through from time to time as well.

The show is laugh out loud funny, but it is also about a time in your life when you are in the process of becoming. Pretty much everybody, except for the divorced landlord with lost Olympic dreams and a daughter who hates her, is an aspiring something. And who gets their dreams and who settles and who enjoys their personal outcome is still all in the future. This series will speak, on many levels, to anyone who has ever done anything creative and lived in a group situation.

When my faux-fiancee Steve and my faux-cousin Julia and her faux-fiancee Johnny and I moved in together, we were all at that stage. I was a stagehand and aspiring writer. Johnny was a plumber and aspiring sex symbol. Julia was a production artist and aspiring graphic artist. Today, I am a writer, although I’ve certainly missed a lot of milestones I set for myself. Johnny was a sex symbol, at least in the DC punk and fandom scene of the time. If reality shows had existed at the time, he would have been global. I’m in touch with Johnny today via LiveJournal and, even though he was badly injured in an accident last year (he was hit by a cop), I’d still cast him now, if I were putting together a reality show. I’m in touch with Julia today via Facebook and she got additional degrees in architecture and works in a field which is one of the highest forms of graphic arts today. Oddly, although I would have described Steve as my closest friend in the group at the time, I don’t really know what he is doing now and I can’t think of what, if anything, he wanted to be when he grew up. From his well-decorated leather jacket to his obscure music collection, he seemed very cool and creative to me at the time. I remember thinking he should aspire to do stand-up comedy, but he never agreed on that point.

Some of the humor on the show Spaced comes from the fact that Tim Bisley and Daisy Steiner have told their landlord they are a long-time couple. But they are not. Only Daisy is more and more interested in having the story be true. For a long time, I thought that Steve eventually couldn’t be friends with me because he (and admittedly many of our friends) had thought he and I would eventually be engaged for real and not just to get a place to live. I did ask him once if he thought we should sleep together. His response was to drop acid and, while still tripping, tell me he was too worried about jeopardizing our friendship which was the most important thing to him. In retrospect, I realize that he was also really freaked out that I started Blue Blood magazine in print. He was one of the coolest guys I knew in DC, but all of a sudden I was meeting all of his heroes. I wanted his approval very much and had thought I was celebrating things he was interested in and would be excited about. Worse, I think he actually had some Puritanical objections to the erotic subject matter. He started freaking out about bizarre things like being afraid I would invite “clients” to house parties and expect him to be nice to them. We’d had a great run, but the party was going to have to move. Maybe I should have asked Steve to drive me to take that GMAT test after all, even if it was boring to him and early in the morning, and my whole life would be different.

I enjoy the show Spaced partly because it makes me remember some extremely fun times I had at a very carefree and adventurous point in my life. Spaced is one of the most real shows I have ever seen, in terms of my own personal life experience. It is very rare that I see characters on television or in movies who seem exactly like people I would actually know. Spaced is that rare exception. I highly recommend picking up the new Spaced DVD set or adding BBC America to your cable lineup.