Internet First Impressions

It's kind of weird, when you think about it - all of you reading this post right now this minute will be forming an impression of me, the writer, as you go along. Since I don't have my own blog (unlike most of my partners in crime here), I'd say it's a safe bet that most of you don't have any idea who I am (yet...). Most, if not all, interactions that begin on the internet are based on a written form of communication. Just a bunch of letters on a screen, but behind which is an actual, real person. And yet...

Let me jump to a subject currently near (if not at all dear) to my heart: roommate hunting. I live in a great city (Boston, MA), I have a pretty nice apartment (anywhere I get my own bathroom is like a palace to me), and it's in a fantastic neighborhood (green space, public transportation, cool neighbors...). However, I'm also a musician (read: chronically broke) and single, which means that in order to have all these lovely living amenities, I need roommates. Enter Craigslist. *fanfare* I've had quite good luck in the past finding perfectly nice people to live with (the only verifiably psycho roommate I've had I had already known for 8 years when she moved in... oops), but this go-round it's a really bad time of year to have an empty room - everybody is leaving for the summer and no one wants to move in. But we're getting a decent number of responses - and this is where the writing comes in.

It is REALLY REALLY HARD to take someone seriously (at least for me) if they can't spell or punctuate worth a damn, especially in something as potentially life-altering as sharing living quarters. Even if your normal style is casual and peppered with abbreviations and acronyms, when you're trying to make a good first impression on someone, spellcheck is your friend (am I allowed to be amused that Firefox flags "spellcheck" as misspelled?). A typo here or there won't disqualify you, nor will a misplaced comma trigger the "delete" reflex, and if English is your second (or third or fourth) language that's a whole 'nother story... but a one-liner like "omg i need a rom rite now please anser" won't actually get you an answer (yes, I received that email, and boy did it hurt retyping it just now). If I'm going to be living with someone, I want to know that they have the ability to communicate - whether in oral or written form. Too many roommate problems crop up because people talk around things or ignore them while they fester - not a recipe for a peaceful home.

Now, since we're talking about first impressions here (okay, okay, I'm talking... no royal 'we' here, I promise), I wouldn't like all of you to get the idea that I'm some kind of mad Grammar Gestapo or anything. I like a good LOLcat as much as anyone (more than many, honestly), and there are some decidedly odd constructions spilling out of my mouth at any given point in time (hell, sometimes I have trouble staying in one language long enough to finish a sentence). But when you're actively trying to convince someone that you're a sane, stable person whom anyone should be happy to live with, because you're capable of paying the rent on time and not leaving things in the fridge until they turn into unidentifiable smelly mush, you want to take a bit more care about things, yeah? (We are not going to get into the online dating thing. That is another order of magnitude ENTIRELY.)

I think this is why, of the friends I have gotten to know online (though some have broken out of the confines of the computer to throw real-life wild parties {did we actually break that door hinge, you guys?}), most of them are WRITERS. People who can use words as they were meant to be used - to express, rather than obfuscate, meanings and feelings and ideas and, like, y'know, stuff. Hence you will find me here, hanging out with other mad Burrowers, mostly spouting oddities but occasionally wearing the serious hat (like I sort of am now - I think of the serious hat as a slightly tatty black bowler, though, which makes the whole thing less serious, really). All of the buddies-who-are-Burrowers originally caught each others' eyes on message boards, out of text alone - whether it was terrifically clever, surpassingly silly, or just plain weird (the phrase "naked Crisco Twister" comes to mind here, for which I am clearly going to blame The Tart). The clarity of expression, no matter our individual styles - that's what I'm getting at here, and that's what is lacking in so much online communication. If that makes me a wee bit of a snob... I guess I can live with that, but I won't be living with someone who can't string together half a dozen words intelligibly.

So, am I one of the 17 people on the planet who uses semicolons in text messages? Has the sentence "Why am I detailing Latin etymologies in my kitchen at half past midnight?" come out of my mouth recently? Did I get used as a dictionary by my mother over the holiday weekend while she was reading a book I lent her in the first place? Clearly the answer to all these is "yes", but oh well. I will leave you then with some truly inspired and favourite examples of what you might call gibberish, tosh, bosh, rubbish... or just plain fun.

The first verse of Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky (the first poem I ever memorized):

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome-raths outgrabe.

Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate (which must be heard to be believed - seriously!)

And the guy at whose feet I grovel for sheer wordy exuberance (and where I got the tip-off for that last burst of insanity) - the phenomenal Stephen Fry! To whom I have been listening rather too much this week. I claim only a minor digression for the addition of these items to the end of this post... I'll leave the major ones for Mari.