To say I moved around a lot as a child is an understatement. By the time I finished college and moved to Cleveland, I’d had 13 ‘permanent’ addresses in my then 23 years, not counting the bouncing around between divorced parents and other friends and relatives on the weekends. School was the one stable place I had in my life. With the exception of a six-month stint in parochial school1, I had friends when I was attending classes. But my relationships with the kids in the various neighborhoods were casual at best – I got along well with others, but I wasn’t around enough to cultivate anything deeper than that. I had my school circle to fulfill my social needs, I was happy to spend home time with my books and crafts.
The setup worked well until we hit Move #7 and suddenly I didn’t have a school to go to any more. From the second quarter of sixth grade until the beginning of my junior year of high school, my education was self-directed from home. Academically, it was a great experience – so as long as I could demonstrate grade-specific mastery in different required subject areas during my end-of-year exams with the state board (never an issue), I was free to spend the rest of my time on projects and subjects that interested me. My geography suffered, but my writing didn’t. 2
Socially, though, things were more difficult. At the beginning of 1996, the Internet wasn’t yet the ever-present blanket of connectivity it is today. At the beginning, my social circles were maintained almost exclusively through handwritten mail. Lengthy, descriptive letters went out from our various houses near daily, relating stories I was working on or things I’d read or deconstructing characters and traits that reminded me of real people. The responding letters were filled with the normal concerns and enthusiasms of tweens and teens. But living something was a lot more intense than just reading about it. Prolific as the letters were, it wasn’t even close to being the same as talking with people, doing things with people, experiencing the passion that comes with joy and love and anger and sorrow in the heat of the moment. I tried to relate as best I could, but it was clear that my experiences with the world were extremely different to what my friends were experiencing, even just in day-to-day interactions, and that showed very clearly when we could get together. I became very good at analyzing other people’s problems and mapping out how different scenarios would play out with a surprisingly high accuracy just based on the characters and motivations of the persons involved, but rare were the times I could find someone who could do the same for me.
And then came the Internet.
To this day, my mother has a hard time grasping how I can build trusting relationships with people I rarely get to be with in person – how can one really get to know another without being there and with them? The best response I’ve found came from a story Lyserg recommended; near the end of Ready Player One, when Wade finally meets his longtime friend Aech in the physical world and find she’s not exactly as he pictured her, he describes the realization as “We’d known each other for years, in the most intimate way possible. We’d connected on a purely mental level. I understood her, trusted her, and loved her as a friend. None of that had changed.” That’s something that would come back to me a lot in 2015. Having that slightly detached viewpoint from someone’s life – understanding the situation without being directly involved in it and understanding the characters from a more mental, behind-the-scenes sort of view – gives insight that’s often lost in the whirl of daily life. In an odd way, there are a lot of things one tends to miss in relationships when they’re physically together a lot. Think about the subtle growth of a child, for example – parents who are with the kid don’t notice the change unless they look back, but for distant relatives it’s the first thing they notice. If you want an emotional example, think about breakups. How often, when removed from the heat of the present and looking back from a different point of view, do we notice things we should have seen then? Things about either them or ourselves that made more sense looking back, things that we couldn’t or wouldn’t see at the time? There’s a reason we have the cliché of hindsight being 20-20; removing the emotional immediacy gives us a clearer head for analyzing what we’re witnessing. It’s the reason we have interventions for people with addictions or who are in abusive relationships. It’s the same reason we advise angry persons to count to ten or take a walk or whatever to physically remove themselves from an argument until they can think clearly. 3
It’s also why some of our most trusting friendships tend to be with people who aren’t there all the time. The best friends with whom you stay in touch over the years, hundreds of miles apart, yet they know you better than anyone else. You communicate more effectively with them. Some of it’s just the comfort of shared experiences, some of it’s the fresh perspective of different experiences, but a lot of it – the majority of it – is simply finding the people who understand and accept us with all of our little quirks.
So what the hell does any of this have to do with podcasting?
The short answer is, a lot. As we sit here at the end of 2015, technology has advanced to the point where we can connect with friends all over the planet with the push of a button and some creative finagling of time zone schedules. The technology, in turn, allows the possibility for the connections with specific people who might never have had the chance to meet otherwise. From a very basic standpoint, services like Skype, Teamspeak, IRC, or Ventrilo aid in the building of friendships among people with shared interests. Taking it a step farther, the connectivity allows more collaboration than ever before in the history of our species. It is what allowed three friends in different parts of the country to start a weekly podcast with the lofty goal of bringing more friends together – many of whom we knew we hadn’t met yet. It’s what allows us to make new RivalFriends and expand our horizons. And it sets the stage for organizing those in-person gatherings, like Orbfest and RivalCon, which help cement the relationships started from afar.
When I think about how far we’ve come since this time last year, I can’t help but be a little awestruck with what we’ve pulled off. To give an idea, when I tried explaining some of my ideas to other people at the very beginning, I received pretty much the same reaction the farmers in Gary Larson’s Far Side comic gave to the cows. Much like my unfortunate realization when removed from my school circles, what I was shooting for was very different from what others were.
It didn’t mean I was wrong. It just meant I needed to find the place where I needed to be so I could help launch our makeshift rocket to the moooooon.
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1 Move #3, when my parents first split up halfway through my kindergarten year. I spent that time being told regularly by my new teacher how everything I did was a sin, which didn’t aid in making new school friends and is a key reason why as an adult I don’t subscribe to organized religion. My saving grace was that my first kindergarten teacher sent letters and care packages regularly until I came home – little gestures that made a huge difference.
2 I think I mentioned this before, but how many seventh-graders do you know who construct and run their own psychology and sleep study experiments with live test subjects? This project also contained a lesson in ethics and accountability, as I felt it was important for my sister/test subject to sign her consent for the project and know the parameters of the experiment. Mainly so our mother wouldn’t yell at me later.
3 And also why, when Killer binge reads through my stories from the beginning, he catches the things I told him were there all along. Devil’s in the details, guys!
thefourthcastle.com 