Facebook Nostalgia

I thought nostalgia was longing for the past.  And connotatively it is, I guess.  But the word comes from the Greek for “return home” (nostos) and “pain or suffering” (algia).  So in our longing for the past is our longing for something that feels like home.  Facebook is a nice thing in that it helps me to feel at home in the world.

Home is an imaginary place: not just an arhictectural structure or an address or a site on a map, but who you love and where you have loved them.  As you get older, you have loved more people and you have more homes.  When I was in the middle of that bad stretch in 2006, people I hadn’t spoken to in years came out of the woodwork to comfort me.  It was like being brought home after having misplaced the map and finding myself lost: like crawling into somebody’s lap and being hugged while I cried, being made to feel safe, like I’d been carried to someplace familiar and warm.  Thank goodness for all of you.

One of the many useful things I do with my PhD in English is get paid a nominal amount of money to lead a book club through novels that are usually about things like mother-daughter relationships, lost love, the immigant experience, and family history.  Last night I led the ladies, as I call them, through “Forever” by Pete Hamill.  For some reason, Facebook came up.  The ladies have college-aged kids, and they said this about reporting status on Facebook and Twitter: who cares that so-and-so just made a sandwich or yaddi-yada has just seen the last episode of Lost? 

I said, I cared. 

The question got me thinking about my imaginary Facebook community.  It got me thinking about the relationship between my past with all of you Drew folks and your presence in my present.  I remembered when we would eat 1 or 2 meals a day together, when my girlfriends hung out with my boyfriend and knew what I had to deal with without my having to lay it all out, when I was aware that MB had a paper due the next morning, when we knew collectively whose heart had just been broken, who was nursing a hangover, whose father was terminally ill, who was nervous because their play opened that night or they were about to find out about med school admissions.  We had an  easy shorthand with which we understood each other, and because we understood each other we were less judgmental, less critical, kept our senses of humor about ourselves and each other.  In short, I guess, we were more like family.  There was freedom in that: freedom to fuck up and still be loved.  The stakes weren’t any lower than in the years that followed, but our hearts were more open to loving and being loved in spite of our potential to hurt each other.   Few of us had known a pain that seemed insurmountable, and if we were lucky we were emotionally fearless.  And we loved each other accordingly.

One of the reasons I’m glad to hear that MB got a new kitten and needs to name it or that Jill is snowed in reading “Turn of the Screw” is because it is like that same old shorthand of intimacy.  I don’t think we post these things because we’re self-important or expect that others find us particularly fascinating.  The opposite.  I think we post these things to Facebook because they’re not important, they’re not dramatic, they’re not “news” . . . these things we post in our status reports or say to each other on the Wall are the mundane details that constitute the fabric of a life as it is lived from minute to minute, rather than from dramatic event to dramatic event.  Things are not inflated in significance, but instead, returned to their proper proportions.  My daughters playing in the yard or the fact that I just cried over a movie or the news that Ron’s kids are sick become, on Facebook, all contextualized by the same ordinary stuff happening to every other Facebook friend.  My life’s daily comings and goings are put into perspective like they should be, one of any hundreds of tidbits that float across a homepage on a  given day.  

I like it.   I appreciate having a sense of the fabric of your life, the domestic trivia and the career sludge and the little things you find funny or what you’re going to watch on TV.  The getting a degree, getting married, having kids, getting divorced are the things that can happen to everybody; knowing these Big Events doesn’t necessarily make me more intimate with you than knowing that you can make a joke out of your sinusitis or that you’re really good at punning.  These kinds of unglamorous trivia make up the experience of living right now, before the experiences are organized into categories of significance and then ordered into a narrative that, however compelling it may be, is a story like a movie or a novel and not the life you live with both hands, the phone ringing while the kids laugh in the background and you struggle to send off that last stupid email so you can help your roommate or spouse get dinner on the table or WHATEVER.  That’s life, in the details.  I like hearing your details.

So thank you.  It’s nice to be in touch with you all again and to hear all the news, little as well as big.