letter #22 What Facebook is Like
Wandering around facebook these days, it’s like being a stayer at a party, and you’re staying not because you’re enjoying the party but because you can’t quite find the energy to call yourself a taxi.
You’ve drunk not so much that you’re falling over, but enough that you’re feeling grubby. You’ve stopped drinking, but you’re still holding your glass made cloudy by the oil from your palms. You need to do a wee, but you’re not going back in the bathroom, because my god, the light in there. Really? Is that how old you really are now? You’ve been at this party for the last ten years?
It was a good party as far as parties go, I mean the place was full of people you hadn’t seen for ages, and you had a couple of decent conversations. But everyone’s been leaving for the past hour, and now ninety-five percent of the conversation is stuff you’ve already heard (surely there’s something new been said since you last scrolled through this room) and the other five percent is right wing wackery you wish you could mute but there’s something wrong with the hinge mechanism and every time you close the door it opens again.
We are getting close to the opening night of something I’ve never done before. Weird Adelaide: A Tribute to Barbara Hanrahan is a collaborative show which includes a series of stories I’ve written, typeset by my blogging friend, Caren Florance, and printed by Damien Warman and Simone Tippett with me trying my best to be helpful; and with a series of prints curated by Simone Tippett. Inspired by Barbara Hanrahan’s article, ‘Weird Adelaide’, it’s a project I’ve been trying to bring to life for many, many years.
Initially, for this part of the project, I had 27 stories which I thought would make a lovely grid when they were printed and hung on the wall. When I was describing the scope of the project to people who know about printmaking (Caren and Simone), they most politely let me believe that this was possible. And of course it would have been possible, and they would indeed have made a lovely grid, but I had not understood what a folio was, and I am exceptionally bad at arithmetic so didn’t quite understand that they also would have taken about three years to print.
So I have a lot of stories left for the next stage of the project which I’m hoping to bring to life before the end of the year.
I’ve been taking the opportunity to think about what it means to live in ‘Adelaide’, to think of it as my home, while knowing that I only call it home because of our history of dispossession and colonialism. By ‘taking the opportunity to think about’ I guess I really mean ‘addressing the truth of’. In this, I am finding myself heavily influenced by Alison Croggon’s Monsters. And I’m not especially active on twitter, but I do try to read threads of conversations initiated and led by First Nations writers. I feel entirely despondent about the political process these days and if I give it too much thought I am overcome by a sense of political powerlessness. So this deeper thinking and addressing and accounting for my own place in the world, this political is personal approach, feels even more important.
I’m tired of being such an arithmetical numpty so I’m (re)learning my times tables. I used to love the ‘speed and accuracy’ worksheets we were handed in grades six and seven every morning. I don’t know what happened, why I became terrible to the point of ineptitude. But I realised a few weeks ago that it was ridiculous to keep whinging about useless at arithmetic when it’s completely within my control to address it.
At first, I thought I needed to enrol in a new degree and do maths semester by semester. But then I realised all I really needed to do was find an app. In my ‘where I’m at’ assessment, I deemed myself to be excellent up to my five times tables, then increasingly useless after that, so last week I was working on my sixes and this week it will be the sevens.
The coronavirus has once again been causing me some existential flummoxing. I think because it’s moved into the next stage of not being solved. I can’t wrap my head around this idea that this organism which probably has no conceptualisation of us beyond the purely biological can have such an enormous impact.
Newsletters are supposed to be the new big thing for writers so they can get paid for their writing. Don’t worry, I am never going to ask you for coin in exchange for this series of words strung together as if they might one day form a coherent thought. Although I have made that fancy header that I think should arrive by default now. What’s your favourite The Seekers song? And on that note, and until next time (will it be one week, three months, a year, apparently the secret to social media success is consistency above all else) I send you my love, Tracy xx
I love this observation about Facebook.
I reckon the 7 and 8 times tables are hardest. I confess that I check Facebook out of duty, but don't really post or engage anymore.