Fun Size Slackmistress

chialynn:

Sometime in late 2007 or early 2008, I followed a link from the blogroll at The Sneeze.¹ It led me to BeTheBoy.com, which soon led me to The Slack Daily. Nina (the Slackmistress) was out on the picket lines with the WGA, and Will (Be the Boy) still had his appendix. They were newly married, thoroughly awesome, and I developed an instant, irrevocable Internet crush.

Not long after I starting reading, though, Will got sick. “Stomach flu,” he said it was. (I’ll let you guess what I just typed into Google to find that post just now). It turned out to be a bit more serious. After 10 days of remarkably unpleasant symptoms, he finally went to the emergency room, and then into surgery for the most grotesquely swollen appendix anyone at Cedar Sinai had ever extracted from a man’s body. Just to make things even more interesting, Nina’s younger brother, who usually takes care of Daisy J. Dog when Will and Nina are out of town (or in the ER), hurt his elbow and landed in Cedar Sinai, too.

“You should email Nina,” I told myself. “You don’t live that far away.”

“She’ll think I’m a stalker.”

She didn’t. She also didn’t accept my offer to walk the dog, bring her chicken soup, or name my firstborn child after her.² In October, though, she and Will invited NovySan and I to join them at the Figueroa Hotel for Nina’s birthday party.

And so we did.

Thus.

And also thus.

Will and Nina quickly became the kind of friends you can’t believe weren’t in your lives all along. Over the past four years, they’ve shared vacations and holidays with us, mourned the loss of friends with us, and inspired one of us to sign up for the Tough Mudder.

One of us, in this case, would be me.

I’m not running the Mudder alone, though. I’ll be sharing the course with a team currently comprised of myself; Kasia Hayden, who is one of NovySan’s Media Lab classmates; Chelsea G. Summers; and Chelsea’s friend Valerie Carullo.

Note that Kasia is the only one of these women I’ve met in the flesh. Chelsea introduced me to Val via email, and I met Chelsea… Well, I first became aware of Chelsea when Susie Bright linked to her blog back in 2007. I didn’t start reading her regularly until 2009, though, when Neil Gaiman linked to her (breathtaking) post about the graveyard she grew up in. I followed her on Twitter, and she followed me back, and I developed another irrevocable Internet crush. And when I said I wanted to run the Tough Mudder, she was the first to say:

@chialynn Fuck it. I’ll come to Boston next year and do it.

— chelsea g. summers (@chelseagsummers) July 21, 2012

So when I see a post like this one (retweeted by my friend J. Nathan Matias):

I frequently still hear people saying social media = ‘not real relationships’. I can vouch that it’s a very real community of support/prayer

— Vicky Beeching (@vickybeeching) August 17, 2012

I say “Damn right!” Because the Internet is made of people, and this is how it works.

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1. A site I discovered when somebody, somewhere, linked to Steve, Don’t Eat It. ↩

2. I only offered to do two of these three things. ↩

YOUR MOVE, PEOPLE WHO DO NOT THINK THE INTERNET IS MADE OF REAL PEOPLE AND REAL EXPERIENCES AND REAL FRIENDSHIPS AND REAL REALNESS.

(Also, Will & I miss Dan and Chia more than we are willing to admit.)