The End of the 00s: Actualizing Myself In The Age Of The Overshare Internet, by Alaska Miller
Excerpt:
Later into the year JetBlue came out with an experimental marketing promotion. For $599 flat you get a ticket to fly unlimited times to anywhere JetBlue flies. I pored over the fine print the first day the promotion was announced, hatched a plan, and called five of my friends. All five made the excuse that they have real jobs to tend to. I have never called them again for adventuring. I’ve also unfriended them.
I flew 84 flights in September to every airport that JetBlue services in the United States. There were 42 airports. Terminal 5 became my makeshift home, I would flip over the seats to make a bed to sleep in on the overnights where I would dream about orange handbags that need to be picked up. In Spanish. Along the way I meant to blog everything but the guy that asked to come along screwed me over on the website. I’ve been editing and re-editing the writing and thousands of pictures I’ve taken of the trip ever since.
I then tried my hand at blogging business news vis a vis reporting. It was a tough racket. I had help from the best of the best in the business, Nicholas Carlson, but in the end I had trouble hacking it. It gave me nightmares and angry anxiety attacks that left me sleeping in the bathroom because I would be dry-heaving in the middle of the night wondering how to keep up with the workflow of other tech news bloggers. In hindsight, worrying about technoanxiety in 2009 seems ludicrous compared to dying in a coal mine in 1809, but at the time I felt it was one and the same.
I had a minor nervous breakdown. I ran to Las Vegas where I holed myself up in a comped gigantic suite on top floor for a week. In that room I munched on pot candy, made good friends with J. Mason, and explored Las Vegas proper. It turns out my hometown wasn’t the only suburban wasteland in this country; frogs at the bottom of wells and all that. I wrote 10,000 words about the experience, about how my most important friend throughout this decade has been the Internet. It has given me work, it has given me pleasure, it has given me friends, it has given me access to everything anything I wanted. I’m still in the process of editing it. I plan to spam it everyday to Tao Lin until he agrees to help me publish it.
In 2010, I don’t expect any job inquiries based on the over-sharing in this article. I plan on going back to my “startup.” I also hope to have a better win/loss ratio in StarCraft 2.
Great read. The whole post can be found HERE
