Viciously brilliant souls with robust texting plans

October 5, 2016 10:51 AM

Or rather, to be scrupulously accurate: We have been parted often since, in fact most of the time, as I live elsewhere, though she has ever been the companion of my heart. But I first knew her as my own on the internet. Making friends on the internet is the closest I have ever come to fulfilling my dream of becoming one of the monks of the B’omarr Order, who keep their brains in jars and the jars on mechanical spider-legs, and who are seen briefly in Jabba’s palace in Return of the Jedi: It is a nearly perfectly unembodied act. Online, we are all Jane Eyre yelling about soul-kindred-ness to one another.
posted by sciatrix (14 comments total)

I have nothing but love for this.
posted by ocherdraco at 11:13 AM on October 5, 2016 [5 favorites]

When I went to Canada to visit an Internet friend, rather early on in the period in which regular people were aware that other people were doing such things, telling the customs guy that I had met her through "an online writing group" triggered an incredulous series of questions. Clearly he was afraid that I was being lured into some kind of white-slavery ring or other, murder-ier plot. That doesn't happen anymore.
posted by praemunire at 11:20 AM on October 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

I identify a LOT with this:

"No one from the internet has ever murdered me. No one has ever murdered me, full stop, for which I’m extremely grateful, but I’m particularly gratified that I have never been murdered by anyone I’ve met from the internet, as that was a real concern for those of us who grew up in the freewheeling AOL chat rooms of the late ’90s and early aughts. Chat rooms seemed to children of the 1990s as New York seemed to Midwesterners in the 1980s: a carnival of murderers trawling for prey. No one, the thinking went, was who they said they were online; 90 percent of instant messages were exchanged between murderers trying to convince one another to buy a ticket to Chicago, all of them blissfully unaware they were talking to fellow murderers with the identically murderous intentions."
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 11:34 AM on October 5, 2016 [15 favorites]

I initially read that as Jane-Eyre-Yelling as one thing: yelling in the style of Jane Eyre. I prefer it. I think all yelling I do now shall be Jane Eyre Yelling.
posted by garbhoch at 11:53 AM on October 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

READER I MARRIED HIM!!!!
posted by ikahime at 12:16 PM on October 5, 2016 [21 favorites]

I am an Old and as such never thought I would take daily part in a vibrant online community.

But it's happened, and I have wonderful online friends (including sciatrix!) whom I haven't met in person (yet) and who are a critical part of my social and emotional wellbeing. I spent a few hours movie-yelling about Pontypool with one of those friends just this weekend. Wouldn't trade it.
posted by Sheydem-tants at 1:11 PM on October 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

I love this so much.

I've talked here before about the amazing online feminist community I was a part of, and which no longer exists but through which I developed a wonderful network of online and IRL lady friends. Lately I've been thinking about online friendships (specifically, mine) and emotional intimacy. Because we were mostly anonymous at first, we could speak with such candor about our lives - I know I shared things with that community that I wasn't sharing with anyone in real life, even close friends. But then we got to know each other's real-life selves, first through meetups and then through Facebook, and there's an intimacy that comes with a friendship that proceeds this way.

Recently I realized that I've known these women, at least online, for 12 years, and while the individual friendships ebbed and flowed, this community has remained a constant in my life, though numerous moves across the country, jobs, adventures, hard times, etc. And it's such a wonderful thing to have these women there all that time, to laugh with, to confide in, to support or challenge me. I never would have had this without the internet.
posted by lunasol at 1:50 PM on October 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

I want this so hard I can taste it... but I feel on the outside most of the time.
posted by Deoridhe at 4:39 PM on October 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

Lately I've been thinking about online friendships (specifically, mine) and emotional intimacy.

I have managed to turn a number of online friendships into 'real life' friendships. In fact this upcoming November, I'll be meeting someone with which I've had one of the longest online friendships (going on 8 years now). She recently published a short story collection and we are both using this as an excuse to come together and celebrate. We're spending the weekend at book-shops and bars. It's going to be quite the adventure.

And it's such a wonderful thing to have these women there all that time, to laugh with, to confide in, to support or challenge me. I never would have had this without the internet.

So much this. My friend and I ran a blog for a few years (now defunct, but this is how we managed to bond) and through our blogging and writing, we've found ourselves sharing parts of our life that we wouldn't normally share with others. I love how online communities bring like minded people together so that they can connect over shared interests.
posted by Fizz at 5:20 PM on October 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Stuff like this just makes me violently jealous. I've been online since forever and have had online friends my whole life but they always seem to fizzle out and lately they just don't get started at all. Stuff like this?:
"I regularly cram them into my guest room and force them to watch television and share the inner workings of their hearts with me when they come to town."

Ugh this is really all I want out of life.
posted by bleep at 5:59 PM on October 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

I miss the Toast.
posted by Space Kitty at 6:19 PM on October 5, 2016 [5 favorites]

This was very sweet. That Ortberg is a terrific writer. (And she paints Cliffe as a very sweet friend.)

Internet friendships haven't panned out super well for me. I got close to one person on Live Journal but when we met in real life it was awkward and then we had a falling out.

I am still close with someone I dated after meeting on Craigslist many years ago...
posted by latkes at 7:08 PM on October 5, 2016

Met my wife online. In a Harry Potter Yahoo! Groups RPG. She went to my school with my cousin, which helped us get past the potential murderer stage, despite her mother's insistence that "Jeffrey Dahmer had cousins too!"

I've also met a few people I only knew though World of Warcraft and went to a meetup of another, different online community. They've all been very nice people and just as they presented themselves online. And like Mallory Ortberg, I have never been murdered.
posted by davros42 at 12:21 PM on October 6, 2016

Several years ago, I was a part of an online community centered around a band. I met a number of women my age (most of the other fans were teenagers) and we had fun online chatting and making jokes. They were very unlike me. I am politically far to the left, and always lived in cities. They were suburban women who tended to the right. I thought it was great that I could meet and have such fun with women I would not have known in real life. Until they turned on me and I was shunned. It was truly terrible. Among these women, one faked her death and came back to the community as her (invented) teenage son. They were in fact very much like the fears that people raised in the earlier days of the internet about internet friendships. Not murderers, but dishonest and unaccountable.
posted by Vispa Teresa at 11:11 PM on October 6, 2016 [1 favorite]