The Internet Personified: You too can overthink like me
Yesterday someone says to me, he says, "You guys are always having parties!" It was a longer conversation, I was attempting to banter, but I may have gotten out of the bantering habit, since I have been ridiculously earnie (earnest, see even as I'm expanding that word for your comprehension, that's an earnie thing to do) of late. I blame social media--can we all just agree to blame social media for everything? On social media, you've got to s-p-e-l-l i-t o-u-t. If someone gets a new job, say, you can type, "Congratulations!" and then, feeling like you sound too much like someone's mother (not mine, she has not embraced social media, I have not encouraged it) you add a quip: "so when are you buying me drinks?" And then you press enter, send the comment into the world, and an ordinary person's thoughts would end right there. Not me, though. Nope. I will then gaze at my own words. Is there not something slightly needy about so when are you buying me drinks? Can I not sense the expression of my friend with the new job, reading this on his or her phone or laptop and thinking, "Wow, calm down, bitch." (I mean "bitch" in a friendly sort of way here, not that my friends would actually think of people as bitches, because they're good people.) With every second that goes by that my friend does not acknowledge my (now shouting in slow motion) SO WHEN ARE YOU BUYING ME DRINKS, I become convinced that they now hate me, our friendship is over, that was nice while it lasted and so on and so forth. I am composing the elegies for our friendship, resisting STRONGLY the urge to message on Whatsapp and say, "I WAS TOTALLY JOKING ABOUT THAT DRINKS THING" and then! Like a shot of light in the darkness! Someone reacts to my comment with a little laughing emoji on Facebook! OH THANK GOD. Someone has seen it for the joke that it is! I have a witness! I am jubilant!
And then a few hours later, the friend whose lack of friendship I have just been mourning, sends me a very sweet private message, saying they'd LOVE to take me out for drinks, it's been too long, and by this time, I am drained, collapsing like a flower in a vase left out in the sun, so I can only manage a limp, "Yes, let's do it" because it is EXHAUSTING. Which is why I have chosen to be earnie now. Everyone gets a Yay, well done! or You look so great! because I cannot any more, you guys. I simply cannot.
Forgive me--this was supposed to be a post about parties. I have done that thing which I avoid doing in my fiction, for the first draft anyhow, which is to solicit people about their opinions. I mean, I send you all this long wordy WHALE of an email every week, and I see that about 40% of you open it, which is not bad, actually, but I wonder, since I have now proved that I am an overthinker, how you're all dealing with it. Are you like, "Ugh, delete, how many words will she WRITE?" or are you the "Please do go on and on" camp? So, I asked people and some people said, "Ramble more!" and some people said, "Ramble less!" and some people (thank you!) asked if I could do a lot more Jane Austen editions and some people said, "Ugh, I wish there was less Jane Austen in your last newsletter" so GUYS, I should not have asked anyone, because now I am confused and so I will inflict this stream-of-conciousness ramble on you, because I am now just DROWNING in tangents. Okay? Okay.
The point of all this, of the friend quoted at the beginning of this newsletter, was to tell you that parties are hard work. Especially when you're in your *gulp* late thirties. (I really don't feel old enough to turn forty in three years, by the way.) I mean, there are things you like, as a picky guest, so you feel obliged to provide those things as a host, because why would you want your friends to come to a party which you, yourself, would complain about attending? But that means, since I'm not an organised person, weeks of stress, WEEKS. Food management, drinks to buy, ice to provide, guests to wrangle. We had a small party a few weeks ago, which was excellent fun, and I even COOKED for a crowd, the first time in my life. But wow, we were wiped out. Like, do not mention the words "you should throw a party" to me for a long time. (I should clarify: a proper party in my mind, is anywhere with over ten guests.) (I mean the number of guests, not guests who are over the age of ten, I don't know any ten year olds, but I suppose they could come, if they wanted to read a book and promised not to bother the cats.)
Actually even attending parties is hard work, according to this very fun article.
But, at your ideal party, you should just show up, be fabulous and nothing should be expected of you. Don't want to make conversation? Sit in a corner with a group that's having a lively debate, listen, and eat olives. (I wish I had served olives now, in retrospect. I love olives.) No drinking warm drinks, because there is plenty of ice. In this weather, there will be an air conditioned space, that is cool enough for you to relax whenever you return from smoking your cigarette outside on the balcony. In cold weather, there is a heater. There is music, lively enough for you to dance to, but mellow enough that you can also sit and eat your olives through it. There is a meal, which you enjoy. There are enough people you like for you to not follow the host around like a wraith the rest of the evening. There are plenty of squishy seats. There is a moment when you exchange glances with the host, and you both smile at each other, and it is a good moment.
This fortnight in stuff I wrote where I stick to the point more:
Great fun writing my book recommendation column this month.
Some of my favourite books are the ones I go back to over and over again. Their spines are cracked, their pages are dog-eared, some of them have food stains from careless eating and reading. I love my books hard and I have several where the covers are just falling off, held together by a stitch and the force of my affection. To more worshipful book-lovers, this must seem like blasphemy. These are people who won’t pick up a book without washing their hands and here I am, folding the large paperback so I can hold it more comfortably in bed.
Chudails and bhoots and things that go bump in the night for my Mythology for the Millennial column.
In fact, chudails (a Persian import to India, actually) are the ghosts of mothers who died either during childbirth or before the ritual impure period was over, which seems totally unfair. Versions of this origin myth somewhat vary, but stay true to the Impure Mother part of it — if a mother dies during Diwali, boom, chudail; if you just happen to accidentally die in a confinement room, boom, chudail. Even infants are not spared: if you're a baby girl, and you die before you turn 20 days old, boom — you guessed it — chudail.
If you write a lovely essay and no one on your social media reacts to it, did you even write a lovely essay, bro? ANYHOW, I had great joy doing this piece on the art of losing
When I lived in Bombay, there was a group of us that always went to Zenzi, a bar on Waterfield Road, too expensive for my journalist salary, but did that matter when you could get one rum and Coke and then spend the rest of the night people-watching? People often bought you (me) drinks, and it didn’t matter if I went there alone. I knew the bartender, he’d make me something extra-extra large and I’d sit on a barstool and wait for someone I knew to show up. Other people went to Toto’s, a little bar that played rock music and had cheaper drinks and the same “everyone knows your name” vibe, but we went to Zenzi and hung out with the finance ‘dudebros’, the fancy Bollywood types and the expats. I liked it because of their smoking section, technically part of the bar but with an open roof so you could sit at a table and puff away if you liked.
This fortnight in the Poems I Found That I Loved section
Lifted
Craig Morgan Teicher
Well, I guess no one can have everything.
I must learn to celebrate when I fail.
Inner growth and fortitude follow the sting,
right? Won’t I rise with holy wind in my sails?
Yet they always seem to get what I want,
door after door flung open. Why are
the keepers of doors, who haunt
the hopeful halls of fate and desire
so partial to them, but not to me?
Yes, I do feel sorry for myself—don’t, brother,
pretend the bitter blanket of self-pity,
hasn’t warmed your bones. It’s not lovers
or fame I crave, nor even happiness, particularly.
Only to be lifted, just once, above all others.
This fortnight in THE LINK LIST!
An oldie but a goldie on the guy who votes alone in his remote poll location in India.
The temple is unexceptional, and it is difficult to ascertain how old it is. It sits atop an outcrop and a steep stairwell leads up to it. A fish-filled brook gurgles past and the mating call of the peacock punctuates the silence.
But when we arrive, the solitary voter is missing - gone to the nearest village outside the jungle, nearly a two-hour drive away, for "some chores", I'm told.
While I enjoy long threads as much as the next guy, I am getting a little fatigued by being lectured on the platform. So's everyone else.
I do know this, though: anyone reading who knows anything significant about either Victorian pseudoscience or the life of Charlotte Brontë is very annoyed right now, because all this is so obvious to them, has been covered in so many workshops and seminars, torn apart and examined and understood, and here I am laying it on the table like it’s news to anyone at all. The other thing I know for sure is that, if I were so inclined, I could turn all of the above into an intoxicatingly abrasive thread and briefly become a bright star in the firmament of what I like to call “Buckle Up Twitter.”
You've probably already read THE Ivanka Trump non-profile profile, but it's so delicious I had to share it again.
The branding education of Ivanka began in Aspen, Colorado, in 1989, just after Christmas. Donald Trump had taken his wife, Ivana, and their three children—11-year-old Don, 8-year-old Ivanka, and 5-year-old Eric—for a week-long stay at the Little Nell hotel. He had also brought along his 26-year-old mistress, Marla Maples, dispatching his airplane to pick her up in Tennessee and stashing her in a penthouse not far from his family. A few days into the trip, they all collided at a restaurant on the mountain. During the screaming match that ensued between her and Ivana, Maples let out a triumphant cry: “It’s out! It’s finally out!” The kids didn’t say a word.
I am, thankfully, the only Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan in the world (on the internet) but here is a fun piece on hunting down your doppelganger(s) on the internet.
Another reason I get so very much email, I suspect, is that when people are prompted to enter their email addresses to get something they want — free samples; access to 30 days of unlimited whatever — but don’t want to get all the spam that comes with doing so, they enter something else. What’s an easier address to think up than one’s-own-name@gmail? Given the number of digital receipts I get for things I didn’t buy, I know many Rachel Lyons have put my address down to misdirect their spam. If you’re a Rachel Lyon and you’re reading this, please know: I am here, I am real, I am receiving your correspondence, and I don’t want your spam any more than you do.
Lovely essay investigating marriage.
And yet there’s something distinctly reassuring about breaking down, falling into disrepair, losing your charms, misplacing your keys, when you have an equally inept and irritating human tolerating it all, in spite of a million and one very good reasons to put on his walking boots and take his love to town.
And another lovely essay exploring ASMR, which is creepy, but cool? It's hard to explain what it is so read the essay to find out.
It’s hard to talk about A.S.M.R. without nuanced language for the things that come near sex. In the absence of such terms, the genre seems doomed to appear sexual — a suspect jumble of tingles and pleasure and subservient women you watch alone at your computer. Who, in our time, can look at a video of a young woman doing anything and not wonder who else is watching — and why? Are those who feel the tingles just a bunch of repressed weirdos? Questions like these have plagued A.S.M.R. ever since Jennifer Allen first cringed at the word “brain-gasm.”
Depressing but necessary piece on the women who cook midday meals for schools.
Guddan Devi, who cooks in the same school as her and also has an alcoholic husband, says, “You will see many men here sitting idle. They would prefer to sit unemployed than work on a smaller wage. They have a higher sense of self-worth, but women have to run the house and feed their families.” Anu smiles and adds, “When men don’t get work, they sit at home and start consuming alcohol. When we have to feed our family, we drink chai and do whatever work comes our way.”
Totally going to leave all our money to whatever cats we'll have when we die.
In rare cases, caretakers who have a sweet gig (say, getting paid $80k per year to tend to a cat, while living in an estate for the duration of its life) might find “replacement cats” to take the animal’s place when it dies, keeping the ruse going for decades. One caretaker kept a ruse like this going for 25 years.
The Instagram famous chimpanzee is cute, but is he ethical?
The AZA adds, “It should be noted that the apparent ‘smile’ of a performing chimpanzee is actually a well-documented expression of fear.” Rob Vernon, a spokesman for the AZA, added in an email that while “many [AZA] members have thriving Instagram accounts with millions of followers, you won’t find photos of chimpanzees dressed in outfits or performing unnatural behaviors.”
Aww story. This town "adopted" a homeless man and looked out for him collectively.
In an era when American cities struggle with their homeless populations, Santa James is celebrated, embraced like a long-lost friend.
People offer him gift certificates to Starbucks and McDonald’s, hand him a cup of coffee or bottle of water, buy him new Santa-themed clothing, including a stylish red hat with sparkly sequins. After residents learned he’s legally blind, they keep watch when he negotiates four-lane roads by sound and memory, the vehicles whizzing past merely a blur.
TRIGGER WARNING: SO MANY ANTS CRAWLING OVER EVERYTHING.
Yes, ants drink. I learned this last year, and for some reason the experience qualified as one of the bad ant stories. I was working late in my office, with a glass of red wine. I went downstairs for a few minutes, and when I came back, I picked up my glass to drink, only to feel ants scurrying across my wrist, a touch like the breeze. I looked at my fingers, and they were alive with ants. It took me a fraction of a second to figure out where they were coming from. Because they... well, they couldn't want my wine, could they? But they did. They were traveling up and down the wineglass stem. They were drowning in the wineglass bowl. I had been an instant away from drinking them. And so I killed them all with the tips of my fingers, because even more than the ants that ended up in my underwear, the ants that found their way into my wineglass let me know that they wouldn't allow me to get away with anything, least of all mercy.
Where do our earliest memories go?
Memories are less vulnerable to shredding and disruptions as the child grows up. Most of the solid memories that we carry into the rest of our lives are formed during what’s called ‘the reminiscence bump’, from ages 15 to 30, when we invest a lot of energy in examining everything to try to figure out who we are. The events, culture and people of that time remain with us and can even overshadow the features of our ageing present, according to Bauer. The movies were the best back then, and so was the music, and the fashion, and the political leaders, and the friendships, and the romances. And so on.
And finally: on product placement in books.
Weldon, then and now, is philosophical about the whole thing. In 2001, she told the New York Times that when Bulgari approached her, she thought, “My name will be mud forever.” But she quickly reconsidered: ‘’After a while I thought, ‘I don’t care. Let it be mud. They never give me the Booker Prize anyway.’”
Have a great week! I am going to watch the first episode of the new season of Game of Thrones tonight!
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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