um... this thing might not go viral. Damn.

CONTINUED from a previous post

...the whole thing seemed set to implode.  This isn't the way stuff goes viral, is it?  By getting in touch with a few people you like who you haven't made enough of an effort with and the relatives who have probably been worried sick about you for the last seven years.  It was like crawling out from under a rock.  Hello, world, ta dai ma, miss me much?  It still seemed like somewhere to start at least.  Importantly though, or so it seemed to me, I had sacrificed some of my anonymity.  This had better pay off, I thought, because I had 32 contacts in 9 days.

You can skip the next little paragraph if you want.  It's about How I Feel Small
(HOW I FEEL SMALL: I hope no-one thinks I have been using people, honestly I haven't.  Its difficult to try to rejoin the human race when you just feel different from other people.  I always have.  I lived through a fairly friendless childhood, where I felt ostracised, estrandged and marked out as someone not worth being friends with.  This is hard stuff to go through.  It makes it quite difficult to trust people.  It was very difficult for me to just learn to kind of fit in.  Its never been terribly easy for me.  That also leads you to have a streak of narcisism.  You think I'm some kind of a freak, runs the heavily hungover voice of childhood past, well, what's so great about the rest of you.  Honestly, I need to be around people, I've just never felt like they have needed to be around me.  Everyone already seems to have enough friends.  When I'm around other people who seem like socialising is so easy, I often feel like the smallest person in the room.  Sometimes I attempt to act bigger than I really am.  I really need to act like we're all about the same size, about the same shape, that we are all basically human and more alike than different.  WHEW, heavy stuff about social isolation and loneliness out of the way, back to entertaining the reader, hopefully.)

Wow, normal size again.  Let me bang on a bit more

... this had better pay off because I can't do this thing twice.  I could think to defreind everyone, make a mea culpa, and start all over again, to use my wife's identity (I'd already established that wasn't a popular concept) or get myself a pseudonym.  I was frustrated in two ways.  For a start, I thought my wife's picture of Seraph alone had a better chancde of going viral than mine of me with the dog.  Lots of people have dogs but there aren't too many dogs on Facebook.  On the second front, I was annoyed because my sister had beat me to the pseudonym.

"Who is this person you suggested as a friend, Helen," I asked my younger sister.
"Guess," she said.
"Someone "Smith" from Brisbane, I don't know anyone like that."
"That's your other sister.  She used the first name Mum and Dad were going to goive her as a child and Smith as a common surname."
"What, like Winston Smith, in 1984?"
"Who did what in 1984?"
"The book by Orwell?  Oh well, never mind."

Clever girl.  Now, both my older sister and my wife were more anonymous than me in their different ways.  If I had been smart enough, I could have done the same as my sister.    If my wife had only listened to me, my face wouldn't have been on Facebook at all. I could have done all those things.  I could have called myself Garant Smith and posted an old snapshot of my dear pearted labrador, Laddy.  Now that would have been symbolic.

Garant... I am not my name
Smith... I could be anyone
Black dog... and I have issues.

But here's where I stand now, at the present writing
* I have sacrificed my anonymity
* I have a few acquaintances in the city of Nagoya
* Great.  All my relatives know what I've been up to
* C has gone AWOL and hasn't kept his pledge
* R is in England somewhere doing God knows what
* My chances of getting my old APS team back together to start SkypeMe@English.com seem well, a bit, let's say, ambitious.
* I still have my old friend E's book.  I don't even know if he likes me.  He @probably won't make a documentary about me.
* N has probably gone back to Boston
* I have 32 friends on Facebook
* I have started a blog that no-one comments on, or even reads
* I have started a charity organisation no-one has heard of using paper cups that no-one has and I'm about to drain the last cup of my own finances to do it.

What's a man to do?