Running, Facebook, Intimacy, TV

I ate pizza and drank a cup of water, so now I have to wait an hour and a half before going running. Sounds extreme. But my body loves to cramp. Besides side stitches, I also get what feel like period cramps if I run without making sure my digestive system is in perfect alignment. So that means no water, no food, hopefully a recent grosser of the two evacuations. I am not talking about micturition.

Turns out running around the zoo is a 3 mile route, which is GREAT, I thought it was around 2. I don't run the whole time, but I'm running the majority of it now. My route in Akron was a lot less than I thought, but I worked out what a 3 mile route down there is.

I started to read The Atlantic's "Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?" story. It makes me lonely. Or rather, the way I use it as a substitute for face to face contact makes me lonely. Because with face to face you just have to have that with whatever schlub is around you, and you probably don't have anything interesting to say. But it still eases loneliness more than internet contact with very interesting people linking to very interesting things. I use facebook a lot in the morning, when I sort of like being alone. But it can turn into a 3 hour internet spree. And then if I'm not careful I'm left to flail around for some social contact.

I particularly liked this paragraph:

"Our omnipresent new technologies lure us toward increasingly superficial connections at exactly the same moment that they make avoiding the mess of human interaction easy. The beauty of Facebook, the source of its power, is that it enables us to be social while sparing us the embarrassing reality of society—the accidental revelations we make at parties, the awkward pauses, the farting and the spilled drinks and the general gaucherie of face-to-face contact. Instead, we have the lovely smoothness of a seemingly social machine. Everything’s so simple: status updates, pictures, your wall."

Farting, dudes. The constant anxiety of will.i.fart. If you're me, yes, you probably will. No farting on the internet. Facebook is a fart free zone.

I want the fruits of going through hard stuff with people, while protecting myself from actually going through hard stuff with people, if at all possible. I would like the feelings of safety that come from being with people who have seen me be a mess, without ever having to be a mess. Luckily I have little to no control over when I look like a mess. I look like a mess in sudden, unexpected spurts.

I think about this a lot with my sister because she has really seen me be all over the place at this point. And a lot of times we seem like such different people to my eyes. Like she really likes to argue, and enjoys other people who argue a lot, and she's really forgiving about egotism. And I sort of want everyone to be good at hiding their narcissism and be very very gracious and charming. Even though demographically we're the same person, we seem really different to me.

But it turns out that has nothing to do with anything. A bond just has to do with how many times you freak out in front of a person. It's very counter-intuitive. Intimacy makes no sense at all pretty much. You could be intimate with a dragon with stalin's soul if they just were around you all the damn time.

And to connect all the things I think about every 5 minutes, here is a montage of Britta Perry on Community. Who is me, except blonde and thin, but really, she's on tv, it's gotta be that way, it's ok.