Written record

So I finished with the kitchen and the results were so satisfying that I decided to continue with the cabinets and the closets in the rest of the house. 

Yes, as a matter of fact, that is my idea of fun. 

Anyway, if you haven’t ever thought about how much the world has changed in the last 25 years or so, then try cleaning out a cabinet full of old pictures and documents. There’s a cabinet in our foyer that for the fifteen years we’ve lived in this house has served as a catch-all for all of the random stuff that we accumulate but aren’t quite ready to discard. Yesterday, I emptied the cabinet, clearing away all of the random stuff that I am now quite ready to discard. Then I started opening boxes and I fell down a rabbit hole into the mid 1990s. 

I had my first email account in the late 90s, probably 1998 or so. Before that, I wrote letters, long handwritten letters to everyone and anyone. I didn’t realize quite how many letters I used to write until I started going through the letters that I received throughout the 80s and mid-90s. I didn’t even remember some of my correspondents’ names, but we must have known one another well enough to write. I read through pages and pages of detailed personal letters from friends and acquaintances from all over the place, and they were conversational and full of life and color, and many of them were long, multiple typed or handwritten pages long. I must have written letters at least as long and detailed.

As the sheer volume made manifestly clear, we had plenty of time to write letters, and not just because most of us were young and still single and childless. There were fewer immediate demands on our time and attention. A few pioneering friends had mobile phones (I got my first one in 1998) but they were communication devices only, used for short conversations (because you didn’t want to exceed your minutes) or for the briefest and most rudimentary text messages. Social media did not exist and if you wanted to create a website, you had to have some serious coding skills. Letter-writing was more than a way to keep in touch. It was a means of self-expression, a creative outlet for people who liked to document their lives and relationships, to tell stories, or just to make their friends laugh. We do all of these things online now, which is just fine, but it’s all very dispersed. If you’re on multiple platforms, and you’re blogging and emailing and texting, then you have to figure out how to consolidate and preserve all of your correspondence, unless you want it to be lost in the internet ether.

*****

So right now, I have a few minutes free before I join my first (virtual, of course) neighborhood association board meeting. When I won my election in a landslide, my first thought was not “Victory!” but rather “What have I done? What have I gotten myself into?” I’m about to find out. 

My son is watching a sports show, one of what seems like ten million different daily highlight/commentary/prediction shows on cable. There’s only so much actual sport that these shows can cover in their 15 daily hours of broadcast time, give or take, so they have to cover events and occurrences outside the proverbial arena. And that’s why I’m half-watching a story about yet another stupid idiot saying yet another stupid thing on the internet and I just have to wonder when everyone’s just going to reach saturation point with social media dumbassery. We say that we’re sick of Twitter and all the rest of it, but the news remains well-populated with stories about Facebook dust-ups and drunk Tweets and TikTok fails. 

*****

I wrote all of the preceding a day or so before January 6, which brought a whole new dimension to the conversation about social media toxicity. My favorite part of that whole awful day was imagining Donald Trump desperate to tweet and furious that he couldn’t. The second best part was imagining all of his supporters up in arms about big tech “silencing conservative voices.”  Republicans spent the better part of the last 50 years or so resisting every attempt to limit corporate power and now they're very very sad because out-of-control corporate power is biting them in the ass.

Speaking of Twitter, I reactivated my long-dormant account but I’ll probably de-activate it again. There’s really nothing that I can say in 140-character form that won’t have been said sooner or better, and I don’t feel any compelling need to have my voice heard amid the chaos. It’s a useful outlet, though. If I can post my stupid comments in a place where no one follows me, with no hashtags that make them discoverable, then I can get them out of my head, because there’s only so much room in there. 

*****

On September 11, 2011, my oldest son was an infant, less than three months old. I was still home on maternity leave, and I worried a little bit about what effect my constant news consumption might have on his developing brain. I’d wake up to nurse him, and turn on MSNBC before I even picked him up from his bassinet. I was constantly on edge, constantly anxious about what might be happening, what might come next. After a week or so, when additional attacks no longer seemed likely, I got a grip. I turned off the TV and the radio, and I focused on daily life. I nursed my son in the quiet dark, and I sang him silly songs as I changed his diaper, and I prepared to hand him over to my mother-in-law when I returned to work. 

It’s almost 20 years later. Not only am I back on Twitter, I’m also back on MSNBC and WashingtonPost.com. After months of avoiding politics and current events as possible, I'm obsessed with news again. I can’t look away. Which cowardly cabinet secretary will “resign in protest” next? (Note: Rats who desert a sinking ship are doing it to save themselves, not the ship. They are still rats.) Will there be anyone left to invoke the 25th Amendment? Will the House impeach this weekend? Will the Senate convict? Will the mobs descend again? 

*****

It’s Saturday morning now. I woke up repeatedly last night. At 5:15 or so, I thought I was up for the day. But I stayed in bed, thinking that I’d just try to rest my eyes for a few minutes. And then a weird sound intruded on my (un)consciousness, becoming louder and more insistent until I finally realized that it was my 7 AM alarm. I’d forgotten to turn it off. 

But back to last Saturday. I kept most of the letters I went through during my cabinet-cleaning marathon, but I discarded a few. Not everything is worthy of preservation for posterity. Not every thought needs to be shared in writing. They’re not all gems. This is what I will try to remember when I start tapping out 140 characters worth of pithy, incisive commentary. And I won’t be on Twitter for long, but I still have a few things to say. I’m sure you can’t wait.