Pour Me A Story, Vol. 16
feat. Celeste Kaufman, the old internet, mental barriers and more
howdy friends, here we are again! thanks for joining me on this Friday, or Saturday, or whenever it is you deem it appropriate to finally getting around to cleaning out your inbox.
can you believe we’re almost done with January? last March took 450 days to get through, and 2020 was approximately one century long, but the first month of this year is nearly behind us in the blink of an eye. hopefully that bodes well for the rest of 2021, huh?
Dot Com Time Machine
at some point in the past, I dunno, 18 months or so, I received a DM on Twitter from a user I didn’t follow. she prefaced it by saying that she knew it was going to sound weird, but did I happen to be a guy who used to post on a writing-centric messageboard back in the late 2000s and early 2010s? she and another user from the board had come across some tweets of mine and had wondered whether I was the same dude. as unlikely as it was, given I used two entirely different usernames between the platforms, it turned out that I was indeed that poster.
since losing my main Twitter account back in October, there are still dozens of folks out there who I had casual online friendships with but whom I’d never found again on my new account, simply because I couldn’t remember their handles or names or whatever. this week I remembered my old messageboard friend and thought it would be like losing a link to Internet Times Past if I couldn’t re-find her on Twitter, so I went back to the messageboard to find a) it’s still active and b) I still had my login details saved in my browser. I picked through a dozen or so threads before remembering not her username, but the Twitter handle of someone she’d mentioned was from the board.
I found him on Twitter, scrolled his list of follows, and sure enough I found her. it felt like a minor triumph in internet detective work, which happens so frequently and on a much larger and more scary scale these days (see: the feds arresting folks who stormed the Capitol). browsing the messageboard again felt like opening an old box of mementos or high school yearbooks or something, seeing old names and faces you used to bullshit with during your downtime every day. in a time when Instagram stories disappear after 24 hours and you can tweet 100 times a day and not think about that post ever again, that little time capsule of Internet Times Past was kind of a welcome nostalgia.
Anyway, We Have Company
when I found the aforementioned poster, we talked a bit about the Online of Old and I asked her if she wanted to be this week’s special guest on the Extremely 2021 Internet thing I do (this newsletter, duh.) introducing Celeste Kaufman!
AC: hey Celeste! thanks for being this week's special guest after learning about this newsletter like four hours ago. how's things in the Big Apple?
CK: things are okay. I am definitely having one of those weeks where Pandemic Things are hitting me particularly hard and I'm feeling blue and very antsy to go back to my life, but I'm also a pretty good camp counselor for myself and am powering through with all my little activities I set up for myself to get me through Covid Winter. I am trying to figure out a little outing that feels like a day trip this weekend. I think I might go take a walk in this nature preserve by the beach I haven't been to yet.
AC: being a camp counselor for oneself is such a great way to think of it, that’s a very vivid picture to paint. and I think the outdoors or just being outside of the apartment just has such a restorative effect during These Times. no beaches here of course but there are other ways. now we were discussing earlier that our online acquaintance was made awhile before social media was really a thing. do you think that was a BETTER time for internet community-building?
CK: I'm going to say mostly yes, for a couple reasons. The first being that nowadays pretty much the entire internet is centered around community building, which ends up encouraging it less. In those days, people really had to seek out places to find community, so people were more invested in those places. Now you just kind of flit from one to the next and have a presence in a million places. These little insular communities were more set up for building relationships with people over time, and were more set up for conversation rather than exchanges.
But one thing that I think is better now is it's much more socially acceptable to seek out communities online, so it draws a wider range of people instead of just the Very Online weirdos haha. I have a big group of friends that originated on the board, but there isn't a single one of us that tells the full truth when people ask how we met, even now.
I do know that people make friends on Twitter all the time, so clearly there's still a good sense of community here, but I haven't mastered the art of it yet haha. It feels more intrusive to try and make friends here than it did over years of just casually being a part of the same conversation every day!
AC: that’s an interesting point because I’m much more comfortable with telling Very Offline people in 2021 “I got a beer with a few people I know from Twitter” than I did saying “I’m hanging out with a few people from a forum” in, like, 2006. the stigma is definitely easing I think. but you’re dead right though that the community feeling did feel deeper in the days where internet activity wasn’t centered on interaction with other people like it is now. did you ever have any super weird IRL experiences with folks who were seemingly cool online?
CK: Not that I can think of. The only experiences I can remember that weren't the best were with people I didn't have particularly high expectations of haha. (Off the record, but the only person I've met off TiB that I didn't like was [redacted], if you remember him, but he was just a pompous jerk and I completely expected him to be a pompous jerk. And a friend met [also redacted], and he was a creepy weirdo...but we knew he would be so it wasn't a surprise.)
I've used the literature part of my degree almost solely for reading into people's internet presences for making friends and online dating so I'm rarely surprised by what people are like in real life.
AC: I guess to an extent that board was built entirely around the remnants of the cult of personality of one guy who maybe attracted a certain demographic — myself included initially I suppose — but then every corner of the internet has creepy weirdos. I’ve had some absurd but funny moments being “recognized” IRL from Twitter but the message boards were so much more anonymous. and to that point — I would argue that we don’t know each other all that well, in the traditional sense. who is Celeste Kaufman in a nutshell?
CK: Yeah, the anonymity of the board definitely helped me feel comfortable with getting into the whole thing (although I got there via my boyfriend at the time so there was one person who knew who I was and I couldn't, like, be a totally different person even if I wanted to).
And oh man, why is this such an intimidating question? Let's see...I have been 32 for one week, I grew up in the Hudson Valley an hour and a half north of NYC, raised by a single dad for the most part. Went to school in Boston and moved here right after graduating, always wanted to live here and will most likely live here forever. I am a writer - that is my Thing. I also love the arts and dabble in a little bit of everything (except music, no matter how hard I try). I do marketing and communications for a nonprofit as my day job. I am witchy, I like to cook, I like to read, I used to go to the movies once a week and I miss it desperately, I like turning out a look, I am doing what I can to live out my childhood dream of growing up to be a beatnik.
AC: yeah I honestly would feel the same way if someone made me do that on the spot to publish to an albeit small audience. but that all fits my overall assumption, if that makes sense? like nothing there caught me off guard, in a good way. what was the last movie you saw in a cinema?
CK: That makes me happy! It would've been unnerving if you had a completely different sense of who I am. So, on March 14th, I had a little day where I did all of my favorite things just in case it would be a while (even though this was still when I thought we'd be working from home for a couple weeks, hah) and I got dim sum, went to a bookstore I love, and went to the Film Forum to see Stage Fright, which is an old movie starring one of my favorite actresses, Marlene Dietrich, and I had never seen it before. I saw Extra Ordinary a couple days before that.
That ended up being the last day I went to Manhattan until July. (I also see, like, Birds of Prey and The Photograph. I am not always as cool as those two movies make me seem.)
AC: one of the things I’ve enjoyed reading lately is @lukeoneil47’s series The Last Normal Day and while most of those stories are really ominous, yours is super wholesome and terrific. I wish I’d had the foresight to do something like that myself, because i also thought it’d before from home for two weeks” and here we are. okay last thing then I’ll leave you be: this is the part where you get to plug something, anything. sky’s the limit!
CK: I'll have to check that out! That sounds like something I'd dig. I guess I will just plug myself as a person haha. My writing etc. can be found on my website, http://celestemkaufman.com (my most recent article was all about how the Trump internet is being preserved for future historians - or not - for the Daily Dot), and I'm @celestemkaufman [on Twitter] and Instagram.
Also, if I may riff for a minute on the topic at hand: it's strange enough whenever i take a moment to take stock of just how much of my social life has roots in this message board i joined out of boredom one day, but every now and then it'll hit me that I have several friends - a couple who I consider close friends! - from the same place who I've never actually met in person. We talk all the time, sometimes on a much deeper level than the pals I hang out with in person, and send each other gifts and are one of the first to hear each other's big pieces of news, and I'll be sharing my innermost feelings with these people and remember "oh, i've never sat next to you." But I wouldn't hesitate to call them good friends of mine. It's just this really wonderful thing to remember that we have the ability to do now, especially since we're currently living through a moment that reckons with just how much the internet can fuck everything up out in the real world. And I'm especially thankful for it over the past year that I was already very comfortable with maintaining friendships over the internet and have been able to combat the loneliness of quarantine a bit by hanging out online.
AC: that’s a truly tremendous riff and I’m glad you included it. coming from australia I was always too far removed geographically to ever have met anyone from the board, but there were a lot of folks I traded rep comments with (yourself included I’m sure!) who I’d have considered friends, and that’s definitely the case too now on Twitter. a lot of folks I’ve never sat next to (as you put it) but with whom I’ve shared stronger friendships than people I know in flesh world. so I don’t think internet friendships are any less valid or important.
whew that was a riff too! thank you so much for sharing some of your time with me, this has been fun!
CK: I'm upset at the phrase "flesh world." (Editor’s note: rightly so) It has! Thank you for asking me to do this.
Running On Empty
for the past eight months or so since I started running, I’ve been pretty fortunate to not hit a lot of walls, physical or mental. I’ve picked up a couple of nasty blisters along the way (thankfully, they were almost 300 miles apart) and there’s been a rolled ankle or a tight calf here and there, but my dumpster-fire of a body has held up okay (knock on wood.)
same goes for my mental fortitude. aside from beating myself up over a run I deemed to be “bad” the night before my birthday back in September, I’ve never struggled too much to get out the door or get the prescribed miles done.
this week, though, has been brutal for the psyche. I came home from a 10-miler Saturday to discover an enormous blood blister under my right foot. usually I take Sunday off and run Monday, but this week I decided to give my foot an extra day of rest. unfortunately, we got three inches of snow overnight Monday, and it was well below freezing with messy sidewalks all day Tuesday.
I kept looking out the window to see whether the snow had stopped falling or whether the roads had miraculously cleared, and the little nagging voice in the back of my head started to question whether I’d peaked in my half-marathon training and if this is as far as I was going before the momentum stopped. instead, I put on every stitch of cold-weather gear I have, got out the door and turned in a decent pace over 35 minutes despite not having an inch of clear road to run on.
the same thing applied Wednesday night, when I waited far too long to get my workout in and ended up running intervals around the local high school track through two inches of snow. physically it was tough, given y’know, I didn’t see snow in real life until I was like 27, but mentally I felt like I was back on the horse, so to speak.
Worthy Consumables
have you guys ever heard of the Dyatlov Pass Incident? my friend Tynin told me about it sometime early last year (I think, time is made-up now) and I was so immediately fascinated with it that I bought a book and inhaled it. figuratively.
it’s the true story of nine experienced college-aged outdoorsmen (and women) who set off on a trek to the Russian Urals in 1959 to hike a peak literally fucking called Dead Mountain. you know where this is going. anyway, tragedy befell the group and they were never heard from again, but rescuers found their bodies scattered around their campsite in strange circumstances.
it’s an incredible mystery and there are a lot of conspiracy theories, which I would encourage you to read about because it’s compelling stuff. if you do dive into it, this is the book I read, and you should read that before the article I link in the next paragraph.
anyway, mere hours before I wrote this edition of the newsletter, this story came across my Twitter timeline and basically solved the whole thing. it’s incredibly satisfying (but I still recommend you read the book first to get the whole vivid picture of events.)
Parting Note
back in the late 90s, early 2000s, when I was still in high school, internet access in my house was still a dial-up prospect and restricted to one computer in the house, the one in the “computer room.” remember those? that’s where my sister and I did homework and slowly downloaded pirate MP3s on Napster.
one time I downloaded a song and printed out its lyrics, because…sure, why not? that’s a thing you can do online in the year 2000. being a book-smart but very sheltered 14-year-old, I really had no idea what some of the lyrics meant. “‘I’m the needle in your spoon?’ huh? that’s weird.” anyway I left that sheet of song words on the desk, my old man found it and wasn’t pleased — the age-old tale of parents disapproving of their kids’ music.
I remember this story because writer Luke O’Neil posted this tonight and it made me think about the band Staind for the first time in like 15 years.
anyway this week’s parting note is the song whose lyrics I printed out. by the way, I now know the needle/spoon thing is about vaccines. right?
thanks once again for hanging with me for (an accidentally significant) chunk of your day. I truly appreciate every one of you who opens the latest digest. until next time, pals.
— adrian ✌🏻