comedy

Comedy is the only acceptable way to express anger, sadness, and heartbreak. The world is a tough audience.

the internet

I've had a lot of conversations with my friends lately about how to meet new people. Having graduated from law school less than a year ago, we have all been scattered across the country, transplanted to new places with only a handful of contacts to keep us grounded. Most of us have new jobs that work us long hours, limiting our weekday social interaction to our co-workers. So when we talk about how to branch out and find new friends in our respective new cities, everyone seems to come to the same conclusion: our best shot is the internet.

I'm sorry, but I refuse. I refuse to believe that the internet is the best forum for social interaction. It's certainly one of the *easiest* forums for social interaction, but I think people often mistake that convenience for something else. There is no doubt that the internet is great for communication, but the convenience of it also breeds cowardice. Instant messaging, texting, email, Blackberries--there is a cowardice to all of these forms of communication. I know this because I am a coward myself. I know how much more protected I feel when I communicate my thoughts from behind a screen.

That's not to say that you can't meet good people online. But when it comes down to it, I am not ready for technology to replace the tangible space of real life human encounters. It's one thing to use the internet to *organize* social interaction--it's another thing entirely to use it as a replacement.

It's not so much that I judge people for meeting people online--it's that I don't want to let go of this idea that we can still talk to each other face to face, knowing nothing about each other, and withstand the awkwardness of that first eye contact. It's about training yourself for the harshness of conversation. In real life, when you have nothing interesting to say, you can't leave for a few hours and start the conversation again later, after you have had enough time to come up with something witty. That silence is there in your face, in real time, commanding you to fill it.

So no thank you. I'd rather be lonely a little longer than resort to meeting people through the internet just yet. Maybe I'll learn my lesson when I am still friendless in a year, and I end up dying alone in my apartment, my body left undiscovered for three weeks.

cynical sixteen

My sister always complains to me that she has to live in my shadow, which I admit is not the most pleasant of positions. It's not that I am so great (obviously)--it's that our parents have insane expectations, and thus far, I have somehow managed to stay just inside the lines of their vision of how their daughter should be (accomplished, of course, by extreme and frequent lying in my teens, and moving out in my twenties). By "just inside the lines," I mean by the skin of my teeth--I'm still too dark-skinned ("Stop tanning," says my mom. "That's for white people."), about ten pounds heavier than they would like, and although I went to Ivy League schools for undergrad and law school, I still ended up really liberal, much to my father's dismay. I also have not gotten to my duty of making Korean babies with a Korean doctor, most likely one who is 5'7" and wears glasses.

But beyond that, I try to explain to my sister that as much as I have managed to accomplish so many of the things I have wanted to, I have also failed at just as many. In fact, currently, I am fighting to overcome one of the most devastating failures of my life. The difference, I tell her, is between deciding to let the failure define you and giving it the finger. She doesn't believe me, based on her cynical sixteen years of experience. But she will. Because in ten years, when she's my age, and she's happy, in spite of the fact that she has to confront her failures everyday, she'll realize that it's a daily battle. And every morning is a new chance for you to decide that, today, you're not going to let failure win.

home

The thing that always gets me about Georgia is the smell of the pines. I always think I have completely outgrown this place until I get off the plane, and that overwhelming scent assaults me, bringing back all kinds of random memories in quick flashes. It's always a little damp, too, after a good clean rain--not like the persistent drizzle we get in Cambridge.