Writing Through the Fog

Imagine that you die with computer passwords in your head, leaving coworkers without access to critical files. Imagine your loved ones cannot find your bank accounts, or that you die with a secret that you longed to reveal during your lifetime. This copy is pulled from the home page of Deathswitch, which I found through [...]

Audio for part one of this post. I wrote an outline of my parallel universes at the start of this year. The beginning: 1. My mother and father, both born in the Philippines, move to the United States and meet one another, or 2. My mother (or father) moves to the United States, but my father [...]

(Intended Title: Fleeting Love in the Time of Ambiguous Cinema, Part III) Audio for part I of this post. The first time I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, years ago, I didn’t like it. The film—about two people who go through a procedure to erase each other from their memories—was made well, and [...]

Facebook makes us jealous. Competitive. Depressed. Facebook stirs up that fear of missing out. Facebook’s meaningless, frictionless sharing—think automatic Spotify updates—makes us care less. Facebook is destroying our friendships. Our connections. What it means to truly interact and be social. And so on. You’ve heard this all before. There are many of these articles floating [...]

A few weeks ago, as I was enjoying a routine Saturday morning of Internetting and caffeinating, a thought came to me: my real self is often jealous of my virtual self. Which I thought was silly, but perfectly understandable. I have an online persona—on this blog, on my Facebook profile, and every other social network—carefully crafted [...]

Yesterday, someone on Twitter posed a question: What makes you unfollow people? So, I compiled the top 10 types of tweets and peeps that make me click “Unfollow.” And I follow less than 100 handles, so believe me, I’m fickle with the clicking. The meaningless Follow Friday tweet. Occasionally, I send out an FF tweet on Fridays [...]

Audio for this post. When I was four years old, my best friend Malia lived two blocks away; I rode my bike to her house, and we sped off to explore our neighborhood. In high school, all of my friends lived within a fifteen-mile radius; we coordinated hangouts over the phone, we sent beeper messages [...]

In the spring, after my winter trip to Europe, I wrote about the evolution of friendship in a virtual world, and how I had an increasing number of online relationships, most of which were born on and have sustained through Twitter. I live far away from these people, who are avatars in place of flesh [...]