I can’t tell if anybody wants to start 2024 or not. Sure, it’s on the clocks and the calendars and the signed checks and whatnot, but an overall reluctance pervades the air. (Who is still using checks? Me. I am still both writing and accepting checks. I will also accept Venmo.)
Lisa Frankly*, I couldn’t agree more. I’m the last guy who wants to get on with it. I’m the person who just barely settled into 2013. Every so often, someone has to lean over and say, “Ya might want to pace it up, sweetie.”
*When you are so honest that when you state your truth, three golden retrievers wearing sunglasses and two dolphins with lower back tattoos of smaller dolphins shoot out of your heart all riding rainbows. OR SOMETHING IN THAT AREA. (Welcome to the world, our first baby footnote of the year!)
But let it be known, I am also the kind of person who doesn’t get up from my seat during the intermission at the thea-tuh. Because joining a never-ending line that either ends with face time with a toilet or the chance to barter for Junior Mints? No thanks! I’d rather piss myself while simultaneously popping illicit Tums out of a flask and harshly judging everyone now fleeing.
So, I am both someone who doesn’t want to get on with the show, but also wants to remain in my seat. I’m ALSO the kind of person who just wrote an analogy that definitely doesn’t really track, but, I don’t know, maybe it’s more your thing?
Assuming we are back though, here is my query for the post-holiday season press conference. How does anyone still have the wherewithal let alone the gumption to still send out holiday cards in the mail?
It could be a testament to the world or my own decaying social network, but I feel like the number of greetings or whatever you call them has steeply dropped off over the years. The few still trickling in are mainly from people who employ me or I employ them or a tricksy tango where neither of us really knows who’s leading (i.e., most of the entertainment industry). What unites them is they all are financially obligated to pretend they like me, not just a little but with “tender gratitude” whatever the HR nightmare that is. (Sounds like a new kind of vegan meat product?) The rest are from friends who have their lives together and I find those comforting in the same way you sometimes open Instagram simply to remember what your own screams sound like.
Where was I? Who knows, but I should mention here that at some point I intended this newsletter to have a weekly gist. But instead, it turns out it’s more of a turkey thermometer of my week. Plop a stick of mercury into my psyche and let’s see what shakes out. Besides tremors and numbness and other symptoms of poisoning.
But wait, I did want to share a new phase of evolution I have reached.
As an elder millennial, I am in the last generation to have known life before the Internet-as-a-given and after it. So when you see me marching proudly around the town square crowing for a simpler time, I am only referring back to the one to two cognizant years I had before a free AOL CD was sent to my home, the first of hundreds of thousands (?). For our younger brethren, it was like your first exclusive invite to the web. Log on and see which creeps already colonized most of the land.
All to say there was a novelty to what the online world was—a boundless trove of information and potential contacts and it wasn’t about who or what you knew, it was about who you were about to meet or what you were about to find out. It was Schroedinger’s Cat through an optimist lens. It might be alive or it might be SO ALIVE IT’S BORN ANEW—we just don’t know yet, but it’s gonna be good!
Well, several thinkpieces, a pandemic, and a smattering of fascist regimes later, we can all agree (ha! yeah right!) that maybe another round of notes is needed.
As for me, I have now gotten to a point where I just don’t want to know anything. And, before you accuse me of willful ignorance, I don’t mean I’m going out of my way to bury my head in the sand and pretend like nothing of huge concern is happening right now—for example, ahem, upsetting news concerning this very platform. I just have found my boundless curiosity and capacity to WANT TO KNOW has been swiftly kicked in the jaw.
I used to want to know things. Now, a great week means I know nothing. I know nothing that happened and I am endlessly grateful for it. And it’s not just that I don’t need to know the most breaking stats on the continuing and fresh horrors, I also don’t want to know that Jimmy Sprinkles and Jessica Sarcasm have officially untied the knot, or that scientists have isolated a new gene for ability to dance like no one is watching. I just want to sit for a second and ponder nothing before the show continues (Back by unpopular demand: the intermission analogy!). That’s what the urge is. Obviously, it is a huge privilege to exercise this right, but I simply want to take the space to acknowledge the urge, that’s all.
My more recent search queries are just me typing grammatically incorrect questions into the web address line, not bothering to open up Google or Bing or my eyes. As soon as my browser window blooms, I just type “movie where picnic ends up being dream and also there’s a dog” and I’m thinking, you know what? Let’s call it. Let’s call it right there.
It reminds me of this ingenious Pete Holmes joke I think about all the time. I’ll sum it up for you in case, like me, you can’t remember anything of your past life once you watch a video online. I assume the newer prototypes of human have this bug fixed, but alas, I’m still running on Windows 95 plus a pancake I had four months ago.
I’ll spare explaining the actual joke (you should listen to him tell it for maximal effect), but he’s making the observation on how we used to not know things and have to sit and wonder and ask other people for answers, and now with the Internet, that time of not knowing is gone. It’s been phased out. Because as soon as you want to know something, nine times out of ten, you can know instantaneously.
Lately, I’ll have the impulse to look up something and then I just don’t do it. I’m only learning things by accident or happenstance or because someone told me, but definitely not on any schedule of when I’d specifically like to know.
By the way, I’m sure I’m still carrying the same average amount of misinformation as the next person. But at least it’s not the doped up amount you get after thirty minutes on Threads, like when I accidentally though you were supposed to take 2000mcg of B12 a day and I was peeing neon green and zipping around like I owned the place when I may in fact have been mildly radioactive (misinformation like this).
I think back fondly on when I had a crush in middle school on a boy and there was no way to stalk him other than stare at him 1.7 seconds too long when he passed me in the hallway. Other than that, all my leads were dead (I killed them). The bulletin board of red string in my room just connected into a big heart. Because the possibilities? The possibilities were endless. Because the IDEA of who he was and his life and where I would fit into it is always SO MUCH BETTER than actually knowing.
The Internet has made us lose sight of that just a little bit.
Think about when someone has no detectable web presence, you can find no trace of them anywhere. It’s beautiful. Their life is enclosed in parentheses you don’t get to see, and I love that. For them and for me. Yeah, it could definitely mean there’s something real bad about them out there that they had to pay good money to get completely scrubbed and now they’re basically starting over with a clean slate. But hey, that’s what we call a juicy twist! Life throwing you a Twizzler!
So are we back? It sounds like I am definitely not. In fact, I think I might be awhile. Just go ahead and order without me.
(Let’s be honest. I’ll probably embrace this philosophy for six more minutes and then it’s back to “yellow spider with crunchy looking legs southern california” in URL box.)
Well, see ya out there!—me to anyone I run into at a bathroom at a party
And here is where I put up the paywall! Next week, some bad advice for paid subscribers! Feel free to write me with an advice question if you got one, just respond to this post or email aparna@substack.com.
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