Loving Everyone Online

I was going to write this post and then I decided to listen to Toto IV (one of the greatest albums of all time) for a bit first, and I'm glad that chain of events occurred, because the Toto-based delay meant that I saw my awesome friend Craig's video with his awesome girlfriend and fellow incredible human Leena, which can now also be an integral part of this post about how much people I know (and don't know, and kinda know) mean to me.

Okay, so let's just dive into this huge bucket of feelings that I have prepared. I've had online friendships ebb and flow across the years, like anyone has, and I've made the most amazing friends and acquaintances through YouTube specifically - since when you make and watch videos there just seems to be this huge potential for connecting with people on a deeper level than you'd otherwise be able to. When you make videos you're putting not just your ideas and thoughts and words out there, but you're also putting your mannerisms and tics and your laugh out their. Your grimaces, the way you make your breathing noises even. Everything about the way your expression and personality connects to your body is right there and anyone can watch it. So when you meet someone else who makes videos in person, and you've watched their videos, it's like you already know them. Often with that there's this click, as if you've known each other for years. Your interests and intimate worlds have already collided by then, so everything feels right, and good, and fun. You can share David Byrne memes and Freddo references forever.

Molly Fairhurst's utterly joyful and perfect work, via this tweet.

I guess I've been feeling so thankful for these kinds of people lately, and all the people who in various ways send out a chunk of themselves to me online. Those that know it and those that don't. Like Molly, who draws horses and tigers and guitars, and whose tweets make me feel like she plucked 'em right from an alternate universe where my Spotify playlists have become sentient.

Like Dodie, who has this feel of slightly unpolished, light crumpling in her videos that resonates so much with me as a person who also sees so much value in those tiny markers of real and fleeting human individual... realness (wow, I'm very articulate - hopefully this makes some kind of sense). She has these moments in her videos that feel like mini pockets of time, captured in a jar. There's such a clarity to the magical little pieces of mundanity she keeps in them, like in this Abba cover where we hear the audio cut off after she turns off her microphone, but we still get to watch the video footage play out as she scoots over to turn her camera off too. That's why I left the comment below, because I felt so alive watching those moments. It meant something to me.

And now I gotta talk about the video Leena and Craig made. The video I'm glad I ended up seeing before I wrote this post. Because here are two people talking so candidly about each other, and their relationship, and how everything works and feels, and woah, I feel so connected to it. I love how it expresses the "muddling through" sort of nature of being a person - the fact that so much of what we know and do is subconscious or conditioned. I spent the whole time watching this internally nodding like Churchill the dog after a shot of apple Sourz, because something about this entire thing is so incredibly me. I feel like I must have somehow been retroactively born from this video, that's the level I'm on right now. It's so good, so touching, and so lovely. Watch it right here:

I've been feeling more and more like I ought to express these feelings and tell people how something had meaning to me. I think this fixation on loving and appreciating others has probably come from a few things recently. I met a YouTube friend in person the other week, for the first time and on a pretty spur of the moment basis. I went to a room of strangers and went home later carrying two boxes of leftover cake. We sat outside a train station as it started to get a bit colder. It was such a nice day. Shortly after, I also found a new YouTube channel I loved, and after I told the person behind it that, we ended up talking and formulating secret plans, sharing this creative excitement together and making cheesy jokes. And then a minor thing too - I sent a cute picture to someone who makes stuff I enjoy, and they liked it. I think that's the perfect example to end on, because it's the most miniscule thing, but it's things like that that brighten up my day and make me feel glad to be here. Having any kind of connection with someone, making someone smile, or feeling like you're just there, in someone's presence - it's all so nice.

It's all the tweets about trains I see from a guy I've met once, all the weird Garfield pictures that one person posts, all the messages about life I exchange with someone I bonded with on Tumblr through a shared love of Nobuo Uematsu. I love you all so much, those I know well, those I know a little, and those I don't know at all.