Weekly Endorsement: Junot Diaz's Facebook Feed

If you read Junot Diaz, you’re familiar with his omnivorous approach to language. He takes phrases from everything—Spanish, New Jersey, comic books—for the perfect words to tell his story. In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Lola track friends were ciguapas; in “The Cheater’s Guide to Love,” Elvis sits shiva with Yunior as he tries to get over his ex-girlfriend. With such specificity, it’s not surprising that Diaz publishes rarely. But between books, he’s a prolific poster of news to Facebook. And he posts about everything, from happenings in Hispaniola to immigration in Korea. It’s impossible to know how any writer writes, but seeing what this writer consumes is a close second.

Bonus endorsement: The Annotated Oscar Wao 

After the Heartache Fades, the Internet Construct Remains

 A while ago, two people I had met in real life but mostly follow on the internet broke up. They both started posting a lot of stuff online. The ex-girlfriend, who, to be fair, does have an excellent sense of style, put up pictures of each day’s outfit on her Tumblr, as if to say to her ex, “Look at these fashionable scarves you’re missing out on!” It’s unclear from Facebook what role the scarves played, but the couple did reunite, bought some land upstate and got an adorable dog. Recently, they married. They seem to share a pretty great life from what I can discern from their online presences.

Without getting into too much embarrassing detail, this is not a practice I am above employing or projecting onto failed suitors. Break-ups cause me to put a lot more flattering material of myself online. It’s only when a semi-forgotten friend comments on a post that I had hoped would sway the course of my romantic life that I remember that social media does not consist solely of my crush and me.

These posts don’t disappear after I have moved on. The other day, I came across a blog post I had written about obvious dreams. The star of my obvious dream has been gone for a while now, but reading my old writing felt like looking at a childhood photo of myself, a snapshot of how I wrote. 

I realize most everyone in the world does not care about my internet presence. This is just something I’ve been thinking about lately: how we often have specific, fleeting motives for our online creations. For better or worse, these ideas of ourselves become real to the people who see us only online. And with enough time, they become real even to ourselves.

Other Realities

So there’s this piece on Slate about a writer who lost her computer in a cab, and after a bout of self-loathing, she bought a new computer. This was a story because a year after she got a new computer, she checked her Facebook Other Messages and learned that someone had found her computer soon after she lost it and wanted to return it. 

And what are Facebook Other Messages? Something no one checks right below Facebook Messages.

Obviously, the only thing to do after reading that article was to check my own Facebook Other Messages. And wouldn’t you know it, but I also had an alternate reality hidden for me there. 

A woman whose house I looked at in September, and whose spare bedroom I was interested in, sent me a message on Facebook to invite me to move in. Because we weren’t Facebook friends, her message got hidden in the Other section. We never became roommates, and we will probably never become Facebook friends either. 

While I would have moved in there—it was a furnished room, which appealed to me at the time—I ended up in my own place, an attic apartment with good light and tons of wood paneling. My apartment is probably the best thing in my life right now. Or at least it’s the thing I think about when my yoga class goes in the “take a moment to be thankful for something” direction. 

In a quote brought to my attention by a recent episode of Gossip Girl, Albert Camus once said, “Life is a sum of all your choices.” It’s also the sum of all the things you didn’t get to choose. Still, it’s rare to see the mechanics of fate, and in this case, I was lucky not be given a voice.