{"id":8007,"date":"2011-01-24T13:56:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-24T18:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=8007"},"modified":"2011-01-24T13:56:00","modified_gmt":"2011-01-24T18:56:00","slug":"hello-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2011\/01\/hello-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Hello, World"},"content":{"rendered":"

A<\/span>n old 1960s\u00a0TV program called Checkmate<\/em> featured a striking title sequence: as the credits displayed on-screen, the background showed what appeared as a pool of swirling paint of multiple contrasting colors. (I say “appeared” because in those pre-color television days, the paint actually displayed as shades of gray. You can see it here<\/a>, in the midst of a bunch of other old shows’ openers.)<\/p>\n

It used to fascinate me to watch how each color remained itself, especially at the core of its own smear, but also subtly changed at every point where another color butted up against it. And, of course, that other color also<\/em> changed…<\/p>\n

R<\/span>egular readers here probably know by now that good friend a\/b, which is to say Ashleigh Burrows, is — when not wearing that bloggerly persona — known in real life as Susan “Suzi” Hileman. And that name (at least for readers in the US) will probably set off another wave of associations: Suzi Hileman was one of the most seriously wounded survivors of the Tucson shooting a couple weeks ago. Indeed, she’s the one most in the news lately, as the neighbor who accompanied nine-year-old Christina-Taylor Green to Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’s meet-and-greet.<\/p>\n

Here’s Suzi on last night’s NBC <\/em>Dateline<\/em>:<\/p>\n

<\/object><\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

I<\/span>n today’s post<\/a> at her blog, The Burrow<\/em>, a\/b’s officially “comes out”: Look world. It’s me, Suzi. Yes, Su— SUZI, as in Hileman? You used to know me as Ashleigh?<\/em><\/p>\n

Some of us had put two and two together already. She mentions Nance’s detective work, in particular.<\/p>\n

Nance… heard the news of a shooting at a Congress on Your Corner event in Tucson and just knew that I was there. She just knew. She and her friend Susan U used their computers to triangulate the Safeway and the hospital and the address from the brownies I had sent her at Xmas and it became apparent to them that it was my neighborhood. She left a message on my home phone, begging for information.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As for myself, I now confess that I’d gleaned her real name a couple weeks before That Day. I ascribe it to the curse of life as a Noticer, as I think of them (i.e.<\/em>, us). a\/b and I had emailed back and forth a couple of times, and once — just once — her mask had slipped, I’m sure completely accidentally: she had two separate Gmail accounts, one as a\/b and one as Suzi Hileman; but, just this once, she had checked a\/b’s mail while logged into Gmail as Suzi<\/em>. The way Gmail handles a case like this is that a reply will display in the recipient’s email as from (in this case) Ashleigh Burrows… by way of Suzi Hileman<\/em>.<\/p>\n

(Normal people almost never look at all these little bits of email message headers. Noticers do it all the time.)<\/p>\n

I remember thinking: “Suzi Hileman? Who the hell is Suzi Hileman?” Then the coin dropped.<\/p>\n

Roll the calendar forward a few days. When news of the shooting first came out, I connected Tucson to a\/b, <\/em>because at The Burrow she’s always spoken plainly about living there. But I didn’t imagine any firsthand involvement. Rather, I thought, y’know, “I hope a\/b doesn’t know any of those poor people.” Because stuff like that never happens to ourselves, right? so it never happens to our friends — extensions of ourselves —\u00a0either, right?<\/p>\n

Only after Nance had done her gumshoe thing and let me know about it did that<\/em> coin drop. So then I knew Suzi Hileman\/Ashleigh Burrows had been shot. But I still didn’t know which victims were which (except for the headlines, of course — the Congresswoman, and the little girl) — not until late on Monday and then, for sure, on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

Then, finally, the personal heartsickness set in…<\/p>\n

T<\/span>he Matrix<\/em> movies weren’t the first to suggest — if only in their titles — the importance of connections, of intersections<\/em>,\u00a0in the online world. We all cross paths, weave in and out of the fabric one another’s daily lives, sometimes converging at a single point (like a blog we read in common). Sometimes, indeed, there’s a little jolt when we share that single point at the exact same instant: a chat window opens unexpectedly, startling you until you realize who it is, or you’ll notice when posting a comment or email that its timestamp lagged someone else’s by just a second or two.<\/p>\n

But it’s more complicated than that, way more complicated, because each of us online has at least one other line, the one representing our real life. Depending on the sort of online life we lead, the two lines generally track each other, perhaps converging (if we blog honestly about real life), crossing, diverging, returning to parallel, and so on over time. If we’ve got a fictive online alias, all sorts of crazy intersections veer into possibility.\u00a0(In today’s post, Suzi Hileman describes Ashleigh Burrows as “my tall, willowy, blonde alter-ego who’s been in my pocket since high school.” Which makes me smile, because I’m pretty sure that<\/em> Ashleigh Burrows fantasizes her alter ego, Suzi Hileman, to be someone whose loving courage and strength she could never live up to.)<\/p>\n

In such cases we can control the distance between our two lines… right up until the moment (if\/when) they collide.<\/p>\n

Suzi Hileman and her husband Bill are clearly people who enrich the world just by opening their mouths and making sound emerge. As for Ashleigh Burrows, and The Big Guy (TBG)? Well, their lines started much later than Suzi’s and Bill’s; their lengths will never catch up to their real-world counterparts. Maybe Suzi will continue to “be” a\/b, here and elsewhere, or maybe she’ll just progress to blogging as her own self, or maybe — who knows? — she’ll adopt some other online persona. (Or drop out online altogether. I hope not, ye gods, I hope not. But it’s a possibility.)<\/p>\n

In the meantime, the rest of us will just have to be thankful for the thin, thin tracings of color (different but complementary colors, and different rates of flow than our own) with which Bill and Suzi, TBG and certainly a\/b, have however briefly but irreversibly tinted the swirls of our own lives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An old 1960s\u00a0TV program called Checkmate featured a striking title sequence: as the credits displayed on-screen, the background showed what appeared as a pool of swirling paint of multiple contrasting colors. (I say “appeared” because in those pre-color television days, the paint actually displayed as shades of gray. You can see it here, in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[183,247,94,426,37,5,50],"tags":[2155,2157,2183,2184,2185],"class_list":{"0":"post-8007","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-everyday-life","7":"category-ruminations","8":"category-02_in-the-news","9":"category-celebrities","10":"category-onlineworld","11":"category-06_writing","12":"category-language-writing_cat","13":"tag-tucson","14":"tag-ab","15":"tag-checkmate","16":"tag-suzi-hileman","17":"tag-dateline","18":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-259","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8007"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8007\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8008,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8007\/revisions\/8008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}