Cloud Community

What amazes me about humans is that it's possible to get to know each other without ever physically touching. Mind meld. Telepathy. Consciousness raising. Whatever you call it. It's pretty cool. Like, it feels as if Joni's singing to ME when I listen to this song. It's something we should be proud of: how we communicate in such a wide array of ways. It reminds me of the song "Virginia Woolf" by one of my favorite bands in the Vagina Genre, The Indigo Girls. Woolf, long dead, guides a sullen girl through the hardships of young womanhood. My thinking upon my first and each subsequent listen to this song is this: "Virginia Woolf speaks to the Indigo Girls who have now spoken to me." Artists communicate with us, the living, through their medium like a psychic to the dead. At work there's lots of talk about cloud computing, storing information up in the clouds (the internet) instead of in your physical presence (your computer, your flashdrive). Whenever someone uses this fashionable jargon, my mind drifts off to the thought of cloud communicating. I've found I express myself easier when I'm sending my words through the clouds rather than face to face or voice to voice.

I joined Facebook about three or four years ago. My nephew Chris posted pictures during his time as a foreign exchange student in Amsterdam and I had to join Facebook to see them. I had no interest in using Facebook as a tool to communicate with anyone else. I was just fine using email to keep in touch with my friends and family. I never blogged. I never left comments on other people's blogs. I used the internet to find information, but not to discuss it with anyone on the internet. I was just a proud Luddite aunt who wanted to beam at my nephew's adventures.

Then slowly but steadily people started friending me. First my niece Kendra when she saw I had friended her brother. Then my other niece Lily, other young family members, then some of my younger friends. Huh, I see why people like this. Then friends from high school. Hey this is kinda fun. Then my mom and my siblings and cousins I hadn't seen in years. Wow, this is a nice way of catching up.

Then one day my boss sent me a friend request. Not just my boss, but my boss's boss. Crap. I had introduced a few coworkers to Home Life Syd by accepting their friend requests, but no one with any authority over me. Dilemma. If I ignore her friend request she might feel insulted or hurt. If I accept her friend request she might get to know the real me and realize she doesn't like me after all.

So who do I hurt, her or me? Neither as it turns out. I accepted her friend request. And many more from other people who had previously not known Home Life Syd.

In doing so, I discovered that I am actually not an introvert. Who knew I liked to share? Who knew there were people out there who wanted me to share my stories with them? I'm still a big honkin navel gazer, but that doesn't make me an introvert. I am an introspective extrovert. I get nervous speaking face to face with people despite my well-practiced apparent competence facade. But as my fingers release my thoughts with each tap of the keyboard into the clouds, outside myself, I feel so at peace. So comfortable. So accepted into the embrace of cloud community.

Some might argue that I had already friended an authority figure when I friended my mother, but she'd be the first to tell you authoritarian isn't a personality type I abide. Mom's parenting style leaned more toward the Montessori method. Whenever we'd ask Mom a question she'd keep her eyes on the book she was reading or the TV she was watching or the canvas she was painting and say, "Hmm. I don't know. Why don't you look it up." She wasn't neglectful like the mother in The Glass Castle, but she was similarly interested in her children figuring out life by themselves with as little authoritarian influence as possible.

My favorite way of figuring out life is by listening to music. I married Hank because he sang to me. Literally and metaphorically. When he plays the guitar and sings in front of me, without ever touching my body, I feel as if he's making love to me. And in this way I have many lovers, as does Hank. We have an open relationship musically. It feels so good when I'm alone in the car on my way to pick up Stella from Grandpa Logan's house fooling around with my favorite artists as I drive with the stereo cranked up and I'm singing along. And woo hoo: when we put our ipod on shuffle as Hank and I make love. It feels like we're having a musical orgy with the human race. But it's not just sexual love that is expressed through music. I don't want to get off on that tangent. (Beavis and Butthead: "Huh huh, she said get off!") I'm just saying songs are a great way to communicate without physically touching.

The problem is, I can't sing. Hank argues that I can, but he thinks everyone can sing. He's like the dad in "Ordinary People" who obviously loves his son, but the son shrugs it off with a "he loves everyone" excuse.

http://ap.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/23/3/174

I can't sing, but I can write. Maybe it's the bilateral stimulation that occurs inside my brain as I use both hands to communicate via keyboard. If it is the bilateral stimulation that's helping me share my story with you, when I cloud communicate with a keyboard, not only is that exceptionally alliterative (isn't it grammar geek friends?) but it's also a great way to give words (stored in the left side of the brain) to experiences (stored in the right side of the brain). Or it could simply be that I can type almost as fast as I think, but my Midwest voice can't keep up with my universal thoughts.