The Internet Personified: Sparking joy (but without Marie Kondo)

When's the last time you went out with people--friends, colleagues, family, whatever--and left your phone in your bag the entire evening? When's the last time you didn't fill a gap in your day, a silence, a pause before everything picks up again, by not picking up that screen, thumbs scrolling, eyes glazed but reading, mouth slightly open, as you refresh feeds over and over again, look at pictures of people doing other things, connect to people across the globe with your index finger: heart, retweet, like, comment? When's the last time you started your day without grabbing your phone off the bedside table, searching for what happened while you were sleeping: what fresh disaster, what new update, what have you missed?

We're living in an age of constant FOMO. Sure, us aged millennials like to think we're all about the JOMO instead (that's joy of missing out) but really, are we missing out when people's lives are unfolding on the screen in front of us? Did you miss that wedding at least five people on your Instagram have hashtagged even if you weren't there? You know what everyone was wearing. You know what everyone was drinking. You know that something made the bride and groom laugh as they posed. You could've been there. Did you miss that dinner party your friends on your Whatsapp group went to together, because you were ill in bed? Probably not--because you saw the conversation that happened before and after it, and at some point, some enterprising person on the Whatsapp group sent photos of how they hung out, so you can deconstruct, critique, be there, even while you're sitting in bed.

I remember my first cell phone. I'm sure you do too. Mine was a purple Motorola, I think it was called a Talkabout, like a walkabout meets talking? Clever, right? I begged for it. It was a birthday present, I was nineteen. I was so pleased. Little did I know then that I was signing up for a life on a leash--back then, never without contact, whether through phone call or text, now, never without contact: period. There are so many different ways to talk to a person: Instagram DM, email, Facebook comment (although who really uses Facebook anymore except to share photos and be on groups), Twitter quote-tweets, Telegram, Whatsapp, it's all connecting us more and more, and increasingly, it feels like, you can never just switch off any more, because there are so many grasping hands reaching out of your device, this device you keep so close to your heart at all times, hi notice me notice me. And when there's no one reaching out, you're so addicted to the conversation, the attention, you go out and make some connections of your own, messaging people in your turn, becoming the grasping hand.

The other day I went out to dinner and forgot my cellphone, because it was charging next to my pillow. I noticed its absence almost one hour in, the first lull in conversation, for a moment, I panicked, how to conduct an evening without a phone? How to preserve this memory if I don't immediately take a photo of it, add a pithy caption and send it to my Instagram stories? How to look up something I'm saying that people are refuting? But eventually, I settled into the rhythm of it, and you know, when I went home, nothing had changed on my phone at all: not even one little message. No one had noticed I was gone.

This fortnight in sparking joy part i: I told you we bought a bunch of games in Vietnam, right? We've started carrying them round to people's houses so we can have a games night/day out of any party if people feel up to it, and a lot of them do. My particular favourite at the moment is Codenames, which is sort of like Taboo except not like Taboo. It's a word game with clues given by the two "spymasters" who are trying to help their teams ("spies") uncover all the words on the board that belong to them. It's great fun, and not that expensive in India either, so highly recommended if you're looking for something EXTRA to add to nights out, that don't involve just drinking, not that there's anything wrong with drinking, but it's sometimes nice to add something else to it, which doesn't also involve everyone just staring at their phones.

Meanwhile, we also bought a couple of two player games, because sometimes people are not into games nights, and we like board games, and it's a really great way for a couple to spend time together besides watching TV or like reading next to each other, both excellent activities, but when you're playing a game with your partner, it's like you're doing something actively. It's as fun and engaging as cooking together, or going for a walk, so if you're looking for a way to spend time with your person, may I recommend Splendor? Or Kingdomino? (Splendor has me sulky though, because K is marvellous at strategy etc and I am less so, so guess who keeps losing but then the desire to win keeps making me go back to the game.)

But you don't need a big expensive set to have fun with your partner or your friends group. You could bring back charades, for example, or that version of Pictionary that just needs a whiteboard. If you ask around, you'll find at least one of your friends owns Taboo or something like it. You could play Scrabble or chess (if you like chess). Let your JOMO really be a JOMO, you know?

This fortnight in sparking joy part ii: Spotify finally came to India, as I'm sure you know because everyone on the Internet is going on about it, and since I signed up, there hasn't been a single day that I haven't been playing something. Previously I have used Apple Music (which is a bit eh, especially on Android/Windows devices and no free version) and Amazon music (not a great selection) and I also subscribe to a bunch of newsletters that regularly recommend music and I used to have to open up the playlists in Spotify and then enter all the songs manually into Amazon or YouTube or whatever, so now I am very pleased that I have non-stop music all the time. (Here's a playlist I like for my writing day.)

This fortnight in stuff I wrote:

Reviewed Sophie Kinsella's new book & also talked about the state of chick lit, why it appeals to us still, what works and what doesn't.

There’s no real world in most chick lit – no #MeToo or Trump or Brexit. That’s not the purpose it serves. It may as well be period literature for how it is read, a bubble of fortunate people doing fortunate things: falling in love, drinking, dancing, all while the world burns down around them. I can see why it works as a genre, to this day, I too am sucked in by the promise of a pretty (lilac) bubble. After spending the whole day on social media, Twitter and Facebook and people baying for each other’s blood, who wouldn’t like to slip into a perfect world?

(PS: a counterpoint on another blog about how chick lit is about rage. h/t Ameya)

Chick lit attempts to turn pain and anger into comedy, with varying success. There is literary precedent for this in the comedy of manners genre, wherein social critique is tempered by humour. This is why Jane Austen is considered the mother of the chick lit novel, even though that might be an aesthetic stretch

And I've been thinking a lot about social media, as evidenced by this short meditation on the form.

Everyone’s a brand these days. People with children perform aspects of parenthood online. Their kids are always so cute, so bright, so full of witty bon mots. People without children perform in other ways: photos of pets, that dive they took in Thailand, even hanging out with friends. The expression is shiny, teeth ablaze in a smile, no one would guess your feet are killing you.

This fortnight in stuff other people wrote (aka the link list!)


I'll read anything about crows.

Crows are among the most sophisticated avian technologists. They have long been known to shape sticks into hooks, and just last year, members of one crow species were observed constructing tools out of three separate sticklike parts. In Japan, one crow population has figured out how to use traffic to crack open walnuts: The crows drop a nut in front of cars at intersections, and then when the light turns red, they swoop in to scoop up the exposed flesh.

I haven't found many interesting things inside second hand books, just scribbed marginalia, but I've always hoped to get clues about previous owners like this writer.

I no longer get excited when I find something as simple as a grocery store receipt, but I still try to match the book with what the person eats. Twelve boxes of red Kool-Aid in an Oliver Sacks book on migraines was simply confusing, but cage-free eggs seemed appropriate in a book about prison reform.

I will also read anything about animals in general, but hippos are an unexplored delight.

Still, some people manage to look away, and when they do, Lu shows his chagrin in the most casual way he knows. This is why the edge of the enclosure sports a yellow, diamond-shaped sign with a silhouette of a tail-swishing hippo and the words “SPLATTER ZONE.” It’s why one of Lu’s human friends asks, as if in warning, if we are familiar with how hippos go to the bathroom.

I liked Erica Jong's Fear of Flying which I read as a bewildered fourteen year old, not a jaded forty year old that the book was aimed at (zipless fucks!), but I also love this story about her as a mother.

We did make good content, we always had. And that content had spilled over everywhere into the memoir I was writing that was not directly about her, but when you’re the daughter of a powerful woman like that everything is “about her,” even the things that aren’t “about her” are, in fact, about her. I didn’t need to make a documentary about her, in that sense, because everything I did was a documentary about her. My life sometimes felt like a footnote to hers.

This is just animal week for me, so here's a story about a serial killer who is also a tiger.

Bengal tigers do not under normal circumstances kill or eat humans. They are by nature semi-nocturnal, deep-forest predators with a seemingly ingrained fear of all things bipedal; they are animals that will generally change direction at the first sign of a human rather than seek an aggressive confrontation. Yet at the turn of the twentieth century, a change so profound and upsetting to the natural order was occurring in Nepal and India as to cause one such tiger to not only lose its inborn fear of humans altogether, but to begin hunting them in their homes on an all but weekly basis—a tragedy for the more than four hundred individuals who would eventually fall victim to its teeth and claws. This tiger ceased to behave like a tiger at all, in important respects, and transformed into a new kind of creature all but unknown in the hills of northern India’s Kumaon district, prowling around villages and stalking men and women in broad daylight.

Humans are also animals, here's a story about the wonders of breast milk.

when a baby suckles at its mother's breast, a vacuum is created. Within that vacuum, the infant's saliva is sucked back into the mother's nipple, where receptors in her mammary gland read its signals. This "baby spit backwash," as she delightfully describes it, contains information about the baby's immune status. Everything scientists know about physiology indicates that baby spit backwash is one of the ways that breast milk adjusts its immunological composition. If the mammary gland receptors detect the presence of pathogens, they compel the mother's body to produce antibodies to fight it, and those antibodies travel through breast milk back into the baby's body, where they target the infection.

Profiles! Here's one on Dan Levy, whose Schitt's Creek you really must watch. (Netflix has most of it.)

Of all the things Schitt’s Creek has been praised for, its portrayal of queer relationships has garnered some of its most enthusiastic, passionate feedback. This has been true from the jump: Early on, viewers assume David is gay, until he hooks up with surly motel clerk Stevie (Emily Hampshire)—to the shock of many characters, not least of all Stevie—and tells her he’s pansexual via a surprisingly helpful wine analogy: “I do drink red wine, but I also drink white wine, and I’ve been known to sample the occasional rosé, and a couple summers back I tried a Merlot that used to be a Chardonnay,” he explains. “I like the wine and not the label.”

On Anna Wintour.

But Wintour is instantly recognisable, thanks to a style that has remained almost unchanged since the 80s. Her sleek bob teamed with a sharp wit has often been a power combination, channelled by Uma Thurman as Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction, by the diminutive Edna Mode in The Incredibles and by Taylor Swift at her most sassy. But the style was “not a strategic decision”, Wintour insists. “I feel comfortable with it, that’s all. I am a creature of habit. Honestly, Jess, it’s not something I spend any time thinking about at all. I come to the office and do my job.”

And Sally Rooney, whose book is on my TBR pile as we speak.

“BY the age of twenty-five, Sally Rooney was a well-established figure on the Irish literary scene.” I read aloud to Dustin, with a grandiosity that would have been mocking had I not already been won over by the book. “IN a heated, multi-house auction at the London Book Fair, rights to Conversations With Friends would be sold in ELEVEN countries, emphasis mine…and —“

“Why do they add that?” Dustin asked, cutting in just as my movie trailer voiceover impression was really kicking into high gear. “As if anyone actually cares about that stuff.”

“Ha!” I shout-laughed. “I care!” My ruefulness was so much so it broke into merriment. “They put it in for jealous bitches like me.”

And finally, since I did put ol KonMari in the subject line, here's a story about the recent spate of Netflix
"space" shows.

The commandment to think carefully about what you own isn’t so radical, after all. “Sparking joy” still relies on material goods to form the basis of an identity: Each object must feel like it is an ineffable part of you, as if your old T-shirts emitted a Benjaminian aura. It’s not about taking up meditation or therapy; Kondo is advocating for something as close to perfect consumption as possible. The idea that things don’t matter is anathema to KonMari.

Have a great week!
xx
m

Where am I? The Internet Personified! A mostly weekly collection of things I did/thought/read/saw that week.

Who are you? Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, writer of internet words (and other things) author of seven books (support me by buying a book!) and general city-potter-er.

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