Pretending on the Internet

At first, my computer was just for computer games, different only in variety and input method (keyboard / mouse) from the video games on my TV or the Gameboy games on my Gameboy. My dad was always keen to acquire the latest games, and we would go to the computer megastore to buy them. I spent most of my time in the kids’ aisle, where I remember the games jumbled in a bin like candy at Blockbuster. My favorites were Petz, The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, and The Sims. My brother loved quiz games like Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? and a series by National Geographic. Sometimes we played games as a family; in one, we raised little troll-like creatures who hatched from eggs, and we named all of ours starting with Z: Zeke, Zachary, Zenia. My dad played his more intense games after dinner, while I watched, small enough to perch on his knee or the arm of the black leather computer chair.

The games felt incredibly lifelike to me, full of real danger and real reward. To say I was emotionally invested wouldn’t be enough. One time, Zeke got on an underwater elevator whose construction we hadn’t finished and, due to either a glitch or a bit of cruel realism, he floated away and we never saw him again. The Grues in Zork would eat you, and you’d have to start all the way over from the beginning, in the utter darkness. Once, my dad was playing a detective game, and he found the killer’s new victim, a clown, dissolved in a barrel of acid. I still remember him opening the barrel (marked with a skull and crossbones, toxic waste) and the clown’s nose and wig were floating there, a complete cartoon of course, the acid was bright green, but my brain made up for the pixelated graphics and it seemed so vivid. My dad felt really bad about it — I think he still does — but an inevitable part of growing up is being shocked by things that you never could have anticipated having to worry about. It wasn’t so long ago, or so far away, that kids were encountering actual dead bodies.

One day, my dad brought home this game that you played with other people. In the game, people were represented by customized anthropomorphic cartoons (cat heads were popular), and you walked around and talked to people and made friends. That seemed to be the goal of the game — making new friends that you didn’t know in real life (“IRL” was the term). My mom was always saying, that cartoon bombshell was probably a nerdy dude IRL. People exchanged little embellishments for their avatars, somehow gathered in the game world. At that age I was really turned on by collecting things. I would secretly play the game and pretend to be my dad, partly to collect items, partly to see if I could convince people I was him. I have a vague memory of watching him explain to his new friends that his 3rd-grade daughter had a habit of taking over his account.

Then I found a game where you could play pretends as a Redwall character, also with other people, “online.” I don’t remember how I discovered it; maybe through my cousins, who had introduced me to the Redwall series, books about anthropomorphic animals waging medieval warfare, with oddly Christian undertones.

I recall a plain black window where you typed, the likes of which I wouldn’t see again until I started my computer science classes in college. Looking back, it was simply a chatroom, but I didn’t think of it that way. It was a world, and you created your own character, who would travel around and play out their story, interacting with other people’s characters along the way. I already liked writing stories, and I was very excited to find an intersection with pretends, which I spent most of my time playing IRL: at recess, when we went ran boring errands on the weekend, all summer.

I was especially excited about the anonymity of the game. It was one of my deepest wishes at the time to be treated like a boy. Boys got to star in all the adventures in my favorite books, movies, and games. I liked to play boy characters in pretends, but then some new playmate, maybe one of my brother’s friends, would point out that I, though short-haired and cargo-shorts-wearing, was not in fact a boy. Online, this wouldn’t be a problem.

I took the Redwall game very seriously. It would go something like this:

jeremythefox enters The Inn.

The Inn would have been the name of one of the chatrooms, and I would have been Jeremy, or something like that. I loved the name Jeremy, but I insisted on pronouncing it “Jermy,” even after my parents told me it was not pronounced that way (I felt so wronged by this).

jeremythefox: Jeremy was exhausted. He’d spent the day traveling on foot across the West Meadow, and he was looking forward to a warm supper and a good night’s sleep.
maxihotbunny: Hi there Jeremy
jeremythefox: “Hi,” Jeremy said, raising a weary paw at the stranger in the corner. He couldn’t see their face, which was covered in shadows. “What brings you to the inn?”
maxihotbunny: Just passin through
maxihotbunny tickles jeremythefox
captainbearpaw (moderator): Captain Bearpaw strides into the room, making the other animals quiver in fear. “What’s the trouble here?” He calmly takes in the situation through his steely gray eyes.
maxihotbunny: jeremythefox, a/s/l?

At this point, I would probably have closed the game, quivering in fear myself. That was how it mostly went. I was always clicking the little x that made the Internet go away, afraid and confused about what was going on and what I was supposed to do, and then I was drawn back in again, trying something or somewhere new. I lived in constant apprehension that one of my parents would come and look over my shoulder, my whole private and disturbing world exposed on the screen in black and white.

When I played pretends with my friends, I was the actor/director. I spoke in a fast monotone, like I was trying to get through a script reading, while having to constantly interrupt my lines to give stage directions and character notes to the other kids (often, just my little brother). I was open to good ideas from the cast, but I always had the final say, and I always got to steal a scene when I wanted to.

Playing pretends with strangers was almost unbearably exciting, and almost unbearably anxiety-inducing at the same time. The worst thing was when someone got mad at me — I remember I would answer with “8/m/CA” and people would be like, “you’re 8?” And when I insisted, they’d say bad words at me, which I took to be them getting very, very angry. Like, ready to burst out of the screen and come after me. I quickly learned to tell people I was 13, at least — 13+ seemed to be the magic number for the Internet.

For all the people who scared me, there were also people willing to listen to me — willing to play back, at a much more sophisticated level than any of my friends. I found similar games in the form of online message boards, where you could write whole paragraphs as some magical creature or animal. It was like a passalong story, and you’d wait, days or weeks (I could barely sleep at times), for someone to reply. You played for the long term, your character development recorded in your post history, although there was some sense in which all of this was everyone just talking to themselves, so it didn’t really matter much what you said.

These games were frustrating and disturbing in their own ways. My grand designs for my characters — I spent hours workshopping their backstories — often fell by the wayside when no one replied to me, or those who did weren’t on the same page with what I’d storyboarded. When people would talk “out of character,” their unguarded ranting about their nerdy-adult problems made me uncomfortable. I’d always been good at talking to grown-ups, but I found I didn’t actually enjoy pretending to be one.

There were weird posts marked “17+.” In one message board, everyone was pretending they were wolves, and they had these “mating” threads. The allure of the taboo was intense. I would skim the words very quickly and get a strange scared, embarrassed, and excited feeling, though I really had no idea what they were talking about at all. It was like reading about the mystical rituals of a foreign culture.

I played these games off and on as a pre-teen, until I just grew out of them. I don’t remember a single event, but I do remember a growing shame — which had been there at the beginning, but now had something to do with the fact that I was too old to be doing this stuff, not too young. I’d stopped reading Redwall and the only fantasy books I still devoured were Harry Potter. If I’d wanted to be a boy, I didn’t want to be a teenaged guy or a man, on the Internet or otherwise. Instead of joining the girls who were reading their fan fiction and diary entries in the creative writing club, I started trying to write “literary” short stories, and contributed to the high school newspaper. I made friends with the people at the top of all the subjects, the mainstream nerds.

I never spoke about my pretends life on the Internet to anyone. As I got older, the Internet, this place that had been my fake world, became part of my real world. My online playthings weren’t put away in the attic like my toys, but overwritten and erased by reality, or something like it. I quickly forgot all those hours spent deciding how to represent my characters, as I focused on choosing the best photos and lines to represent my teenaged self. It wasn’t as fun, but the Internet and I had changed, and we couldn’t go Home again.

That specially delicious feeling of pretends is lost now, like the overwhelming excitement of Christmas morning — but I can still feel the ghost of it. When I left my job without knowing what to do next, I looked for signs of something I’d always been interested in. Writing had been an obsession since I could hold a crayon, and it was suddenly impossible for me to ignore the thousands and thousands of words I’d typed, voluntarily, on those internet chat rooms and message boards. I still didn’t like it, but it seemed a not-insignificant part of my past.

When I told my fiancé about my online roleplaying, I felt like I was dropping all my pretense of having been just a little bit awkward as a kid. As per usual with confessions like this, I expected my pent-up emotions would be matched by his shock and disgust, but he just listened as he would to any other story from my childhood, not particularly interested or disinterested. To him, this stuff was just one of many weird things that kids get into. What a relief.

I looked up one of the old message boards I frequented and it’s gone now. The top hit is a seemingly alt-right / 4chan wiki that I feel lucky never to have seen before. For some reason it has a ridiculously angry description of that old roleplaying site: “The general populace of this filthy rat’s nest consists of furries, basement-dwellers, and your occasional lesbian!” (And that was one of the tamer lines.) All online roleplayers are female, the wiki says, even the ones who claim to be men. It’s the kind of stuff that hurts because it gets at something true. But I’m sure there were other smart little kids who just wanted to play pretends games, who discovered the concept of furries way too young and were embarrassed and disturbed that somebody would put boobs on animals.

These places on the Internet end up becoming havens for people with too much time on their hands, which includes the usual adult suspects and, I can’t help but think, a lot of precocious kids like me. I know I turned out fine, that I didn’t encounter close to the worst of the Internet, and that it’s inevitable kids explore and find stuff that bothers them. Still, I wonder if there could be a place for dreamy kids, where they don’t have to be adults, and don’t have to carry around the feeling that something’s not right. That would be nice. But it is it too much to ask of a free Internet and smart 8 year-olds?

I wonder, too, if growing up with YouTube and social media means that kids no longer think of the Internet as a place to pretend. It certainly isn’t normal anymore for thirty-something parents to walk around anonymous chatrooms, dressed as a leopard in a suit. Yet some days I’d take that Internet, back when it was mostly a game.

I can still make it disappear by clicking x, and return to my real life. I think, I hope, we’ll always have that.

Rail to Your Friends

I got my first literary rejection the other day.

Tl;dr: On the 3rd of July I came up with a poem I called “Donald Trump Sings America,” I submitted it almost on a whim to an online humor magazine, it was I think rightly rejected, the entire thing took place in the span of one afternoon, and I have some emotions to sort out about it (that’s the tl;dr part).

Here is the poem:

Donald Trump Sings America

Oh beautiful, forsake it, I’m
Bored. Anger’s how we gain!
For fakers, Haters, refugees:
Go home, you’re super Lame!
America! AMERICA!
God’s dead, your Face is me
So crown me Good
White Brotherhood
From ME to shining ME

I have mixed emotions about the poem. Unlike the stuff I’ve been putting on this blog, which I’m pretty satisfied with, I was (and am) slightly bothered by it. “Anger’s how we gain!” sounds like nothing anyone would ever say, also I’m not sure that Trump modifies with “super,” that’s more my generation’s word, and I doubt “forsake” is in his vocabulary (what is being forsaken, exactly?). “God’s dead” is maybe too dark and overloaded. The third line doesn’t come close to evoking the sounds of “purple mountains,” which was kind of the whole point.

But maybe that wasn’t the whole point. And “forsake it” and “God’s dead” could work, in their own ways, if you squinted. Maybe the piece was successful despite these problems. I wasn’t sure, until it was rejected. Overall, the concept had a certain charm to it, and the execution had its moments, I thought. Maybe it would resonate with people. I really had no idea. I guess I still don’t, which is probably a feeling I’ll have to get used to.

The poem’s inception was delightfully serendipitous, and I lived in that mood until I hit “send” and my piece was whisked away on the same creative breeze that had brought it to me. I’d been sitting in my living room, thinking about the 4th of July. I had the misinformed notion that it was the 100-year anniversary of “America the Beautiful,” because I’d seen a headline in an alert on my phone that I must have misread. As I sang the song in my mind I thought about how “for spacious” could sound like “forsaken,” and then the idea came to me. At first the poem contained more direct rhymes with each word in the original song, completely unpublishable stuff like “Unglove my putrid pain.” Then I looked at a rhyming dictionary (sue me), and I spent some time, maybe a few hours, maybe less, editing and trying to get the concept across better, though I couldn’t come up with anything relevant that rhymed with “purple mountains.”

With “White Brotherhood,” I had just left the original line until I suddenly looked at it a different way. When I came up with that, I was like, ooh, this is good.

So then I thought, maybe this is funny and I should put it…somewhere, as my comment about 4th of July. But it didn’t convey what I actually felt about the holiday, and anyway I didn’t really want to upset people. Such a Facebook post would be uncharacteristic and need explanation; it might have been good for Twitter, but I don’t tweet. And it didn’t feel right for my blog, either.

Then I remembered this humor site I occasionally read (present tense!), McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, which has an irreverent and politically liberal sense of humor and publishes a lot of shorter pieces. Sort of like New Yorker cartoons, some make me laugh out loud; some I find clever but not very provocative; some make me feel unhip and uneducated and annoyed about this, the way many Americans must feel about everything in The New Yorker; and some I don’t think are that funny.

Still, I would love to be published there, and at times think to myself, maybe I should try to write a humor piece. Then I wait for a funny thought to occur, and then I start writing about something else. Now, I decided I was going about it the right way — I’d had a funny thought, and then I’d remembered how to publish it. But I had to do so quickly, since this was about the 4th of July and the song anniversary. I remembered that the McSweeney submissions page had said something about Timely submissions.

The McSweeney submissions page is intimidating, in a literary and clever way that insists it isn’t trying to be intimidating, but rather to be funny, friendly, and precise. The tone is that the editors are frustrated with the massive volume of incorrect submissions they receive, but they are simultaneously above being frustrated, and poking ironic fun at the position they find themselves in of frustrated editorial staff. One rule reads, “If you submit a piece of writing intended for the magazine to the web-submissions address, you will confuse us, and if you confuse us, we will accidentally delete your work without reading it, and then we will laugh and never give it another moment’s thought, and we will sleep the carefree sleep of young children.” The subtext is that if you don’t find this funny and charming, you probably shouldn’t be submitting, because you’re the type of person who makes the submission process more difficult for everyone and, on top of it, takes everything personally.

I tried to make sure I read all the rules. First, I saw the part about Timely submissions concerning the current news, which I’d already basically read in the past and decided my poem fit into, so I didn’t quite digest the the words “news of the past 24- to 48-hours,” which might have given me some pause, since my poem was about the future.

I continued on:

SOME REASONS WE MIGHT SEND BACK OR DISLIKE YOUR SUBMISSION

The following features do not necessarily disqualify any submission guilty of one or more of them, but they do not help one’s cause:

Your submission was of the poetry type.

Your submission was too long.

Your submission included the words “these days” or “nowadays.”

Your submission did not take place in a jungle.

...

(The jungle line is an example of something I don’t get.) Ok, my “song” was sort of a poem, this was maybe a problem, but I felt like I’d read poetry on their site before. (Later, as I was reading more of the site’s archives and realizing soberly how witty and well-developed the content was, I indeed found a series of limericks about philosophers, and an iambic pentameter scene called “Guildenstern and Rosencrantz and Hall and Oates.”) Further on in the rules, I read again “POETRY: We’re not considering poetry at this time.” But was my piece really poetry? It was more of a concept. It could have just as easily been written as a paragraph. Also, why did the rules contradict themselves — in one, poetry did “not necessarily disqualify,” but in the other, poetry was not wanted? There was clearly a gray area. I started drafting my email.

I appended my poem(?) with a note: “Sorry, I realize this is kind of poetry, but it’s short so hopefully not too much a waste of your time to read.” Then, I had at first written “Timely because of the 100th anniversary,” but I paused mid-sentence to verify that claim, and realized that the song was written in 1910 and there wasn’t really any Google News about it whatsoever. Shaken, I wrote, “Timely because of the 4th,” somewhat pathetically. I still thought it was Timely; I couldn’t really imagine it playing as well if it wasn’t published tomorrow. “Thanks so much for considering,” I added, which of course I meant. It’s really amazing that you can submit something and a real person reads it.

Another reason they might send back or dislike (is there a difference?) your submission: “Your submission was about being rejected by a literary magazine or website, such as the one’s [sic] whose guidelines you are currently reading.” Another section reads that if you don’t hear back from them, you should “Rail to your friends about the callous insensitivity of free, Web-based content outlets to the needs and feelings of writers. Vow the most thorough and satisfying of revenges.”

The submissions guidelines even have a way of making me feel super Lame about writing this blog post. [sic] burn though, right?

I didn’t really believe my poem would be published. I had mixed feelings about it, and it had been the work of a few hours. Yet, the reason you submit something is because you believe it could, maybe, possibly, deserve to be published. So there was, in fact, a small part of me that believed that my poem might, suddenly and very soon, go from my brain to the pages of the internet. From there, I saw it going viral, of course. I saw hate mail, since I’d included my email per the rules, and my real name per no good reason. People in red hats would be looking me up online and finding my blog and maybe where I live, since (contrary to what my fiancé insists is “just basic probability”) there is definitely only one Paige Dunn-Rankin in the world, and it’s me.

I noticed that my throat was thumping with my heartbeat. In fact my whole shoulder area, awkwardly nestled between the two back couch cushions, was throbbing. I must have had too much caffeine today, I thought, and not enough water.

A few hours later, the editor wrote back “Hi Paige — It’s a pass, but thanks for the look! Best, X.” It was amazing to hear back so quickly (I’m still waiting to hear the fate of a story at 3 different places, which I submitted about 7 weeks ago, and that’s very typical). I thought it was a great reply: simple, friendly, somehow positive. I wasn’t crushed when I read it, I wasn’t surprised, in fact my overall feeling was relief. I was also proud of myself. I think Eleanor Roosevelt said to do something that scares you every day? I’ve been doing that more and more, maybe not daily but with much greater frequency than I can ever recall in my life. Realizing that the things that scare you aren’t actually terrible, and in fact they’re worth doing, hasn’t stopped feeling revelatory. (Although I think that quote should have really clarified: “something you’ve been wanting to do, that scares you.”)

Still, “thanks for the look!” kept running through my head as I made myself some lunch and thought about what I would be writing for the rest of the day. I didn’t really feel like writing. I felt tense, and my face was hot.

Could “thanks for the look!” mean that they’d enjoyed it even slightly (but then wouldn’t they have said that)? If they’d really rejected it because it was a poem, would they have told me? Did that mean that they’d rejected it because it was bad first, poem second? Or did “thanks for the look!” mean they agreed it probably had been worth submitting, just didn’t quite meet the bar? I knew how silly it was to read into this line (An automated email following my submission had said “You can expect a short, quick, and unintentionally curt yay or nay soon”), but I was still doing it.

I read my poem again and felt the cloud of “nay.” “Anger’s how we gain!” didn’t just sound imperfect anymore, it sounded stupid. And yet — “thanks for the look!” — there were still parts of the poem I liked. Was I going to let one rejection convince me the poem was no good? But it was too on-the-nose, for sure. Too one-note. I’d suspected as much, and my suspicions were confirmed.

I was so confused and embarrassed for thinking the poem had been worth submitting that I didn’t tell a soul. I was simultaneously frustrated at myself for being so sensitive about what was, essentially, the most lite form of rejection I could ever expect as a writer. I wanted to get my thoughts right. These posts are the best help I know; there’s something about writing publicly under my name that keeps me honest and fair.

I guess now what I have toward the poem it is a kind of fondness, for something misshapen and interesting and not my best attempt. I still don’t regret submitting it. Because I did, I have a new respect, and perspective, for the emotions that come with.

I think the takeaway is — keep submitting. It’s the only way. Maybe I don’t have the makeup to be a Timely humor writer; I think I need to let things simmer a bit, make sure I have some distance to assess and decide to proudly stand behind my work, because then I won’t feel so affected by another’s opinion. Although I think that’s very hard either way. But it’ll get easier, for sure.

And there’s nothing wrong with testing the waters. I guess that’s what I was doing, without really knowing it. Dipping a toe so I could draw a quick breath at the cold. And dive in anyway.