There are many drawbacks to living in the Age Of The Internet. Among them is the fact that I can no longer have a phone conversation where I sound like a marginally well-functioning human being as opposed to an awkward, stuttering person-bot programmed to focus solely on how quickly the interaction can come to an end (apparently this “condition” is increasingly common nowadays thanks to the fact that emojis let us LOL without actually risking another wrinkle).
So, okay, the fact that people can now communicate without actually seeing each other is potentially problematic, and a bit of a bummer. But it also means that people like me, who live thousands of miles away from many of the people they love the most in the world, get to occasionally feel like those people are a part of their lives in the present moment, not just in occasional “so what have you been up to?!” bursts.
Take Francesca, for example (who lives only about 400 miles away, in Los Angeles, but still: I would very much like to see her every single day, so the example holds). Every once in awhile we get on a back-and-forth text or email marathon about nothing especially important – and it’s those kinds of conversations I love the most, because you skip all the “catching up” and just…talk.
What yesterday’s text marathon was about: Francesca saw my “hmmm what do I do with my mantle” post, and decided to style it for me (albeit remotely).
(She said that I could post this text conversation, with the caveat that she would like you to know that she is not ordinarily such a bossypants. Debatable, but she’s so good at this that bossypantsness is perfectly acceptable in this case ;).
Here’s how it went:
Anyway, it all made me feel like we were hanging out together on my couch and messing around with flowers – nothing bigger than that, but it’s those simple interactions that you sometimes miss the most when you’re very far away. Text messages may be only a faint approximation of what it’s like to be together IRL, but still: these kinds of situations make me like this whole “living in the Age of the Internet” thing really a lot.
P.S. The gorgeous Stay Gold painting was a gift from a reader, Laura; you can check out her work here.
