November 20th, 2008
Imagine Us
Have you ever spoken with someone, known someone, for a long time, only to discover it was mostly imaginary?
Transcriptorial: We are invisible voices, you and me. / Imagine us.
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Yes. Myself.
I live a mask to the world, and when I wanted to show somebody what was underneath, I could not find who I thought I was.
Besides that, many of my friends are people across the internet, whose names, faces, jobs, locations, families, even genders I will never know. Somehow I do not find this to get in the way of friendship. After all, how do you define who a person is besides how they interact with you?
Definitely. Sometimes knowing those other things really just gets in the way.
Yea like family especially dads.
There was someone I met years go online through stories. We still talk to each other to this day and keep up on our lives. It’s funny. We’ve never met in person, we talk about doing it one day, but who knows if we’ll ever get the chance.
It’s weird to call someone a friend who you don’t even know in person. Who knows if they’re real?
I’m curious: through stories? Do you mean you shared stories, fiction and such, with each other, as writers? Or do you mean something else?
Fiction, actually. She had wrote a wonderful story with a friend and I commented on it every chapter. The site used allowed people to view personally messengers like AIM or MSN, and we started talking. That was… oh my, probably about three or four years ago. And now we still write together.
I have an “imaginery” boyfriend who I talk to online and it’s like we never met in person. I think the best way is going on dates online then on real life. I see it as no one get hurt policy ^.^
I’m curious, what do you do on an online date? Do you IM, do you go to a virtual world like Second Life, do you play an MMO like WoW?
though it was a short time, it was still imaginary
Into whose ear the deeds are spoken. The only
listener. So I believed
he would remember everything, the murmuring trees,
the sunshine’s zealotry, its deep
unevenness…
from “History” by Jorie Graham
I think this poem in its entirety enacts a powerful critique of fantasy.
when i first met my ex-good friend, it was online. we talked for over a year before we met. i’ve seen him three or four times now, in person. we still talk, but not as much. no matter how often i see him or hear his voice or anything, i swear he’s fake. i could live in the small three-inch-wide room with him for twenty years; he’ll never be a real boy.
maybe he should envy Pinocchio…
Hm. Hm.
Most of my friends are people about whom I know very little. This can be said offline as well as on. It’s easier to create an “online persona” for people who will never see your reality…but for some, it’s also easier to be your real self without having to meet the critical or derisive eyes of others, see their reaction, etc.
Which is the “real” me? The “real” you?
My mother told me recently that she might not understand my writing as well as other people do, but that she loves me dearly. I used to find it difficult to feel seen or loved by people for whom poetry means nothing.
A certain kind of loving is paying deliberate attention.
Before I first fell in love, I felt unknown. I was buried in love. The legacy of my loss is that I will, I hope, always have recourse to reality. He freed me by coming to know me so deeply.
We made the mistake of becoming banality’s victims. We know better now, I think.
Song is reality and music is everywhere.
I live this continually, my blind roommate uses a screen reader to work his computer. The voices are run through such headsets… but they’re much more refined than the Votrax unit of ‘Colossus’ or Majel Barret doing monotone for classic Star Trek.
Cue up ‘Jontru’ from the ZAKAS ‘Shunk Daddy Grind’ album.
yes. it was my fault, and it hurts every day.
Yes! Yes! Yes!
My first, my only true penpal.
Meeting him as an adult years later was not a mistake, but I miss him as a character in my day dreaming.
My father once told me after a serious breakup, that love, as real as it may feel and as much as it may seem secure, is usually 90% in your head and only 10% real… If you think hard about it you’ll see the truths in this statement.
IMO most people who suffer these hard breakups are having to break up with that imaginary part of what was real to them.
Very clever. I think I’ve seen this from experience, too.
Me I never bother to separate the imaginary from the real. Because, see, the real is the perceived, and the imaginary is… what, the improvement of the perceived so you’ll like it better? Who said the perceived had anything to do with truth anyway?
What is truth? Truth is nothing. It is a tiny speck of clairvoyance that is useless to almost everyone.
I usually am able to identify at the onset which is imaginary and which is not.
If I choose to be caught up BY the imaginary, it is because innate in me is that unending hope.
I hope that by being real amidst the imaginary, the latter may see me for what I really am…
Or i may see the imaginary for what it really is…. Its reality.
True; without the reality of the imaginary, there would be no creative expression. Michelangelo wouldn’t have bothered, because his “Last Judgement” depicted something that “isn’t real.” Or wasn’t–because it certainly is now.
And we are enriched by it.
There has always been that creative expression.
But people only tend to see amidst the glaring glow of lime lights…
Amidst the growing consensus…
Amidst the comfort of communal acquiescence.
I’ve always been enamored by raw and quiet talent, genius in lackluster form, shyness in people of pure power, nonchalance in class unbecoming, free-spiritedness in wonder peeps of pure reckoning.
I can count in one hand the number of people who have made quite an impression on me when it comes to their modes of expression. Their luster I gazed at in unadulterated form, when the world hasn’t seen yet the geniuses they’ve become.
Knowing people this way makes me appreciate them more. I find it more sentimental, more personal, more real…
I don’t know. Maybe I seek to see people this way… know people this way… appreciate people this way, and see them for the gems they really are with or without the mass accolade because that too, is how i wanna be seen, how i wanna be accepted.
A precious stone doesn’t become a gem just because somebody has seen it and has decided to call it a gem.
A gem is a gem is a gem.
A diamond, a diamond.
A zircon, a zircon.
Coal, coal.
Michelangelo has always been Michelangelo.
We all have niches where we thrive best.
We each have our purpose.
We all just need time to shine.
And a space where we shine our brightest.
Why not make the packaging unattractive i.e. enforce a minimum size for the packet, heavier weight cardboard etc so it doesn’t fit in your pocket and therefore becomes bulky to carry and no longer seen as a status symbol to the under age.