What can you say about a
19-year-old girl who
died? That she was beautiful, and wrote well, that she loved
basketball and the ocean. And that
she didn’t exist.
I picked an interesting weekend to spend offline — when I turned off
the machine on Friday, I’d heard nothing about Kaycee’s non-existence;
when I turned it on today and read the
DaveNet waiting for me in my
mail, the truth was out there.
I don’t know how I would have reacted if I’d been watching the story
develop, or if I’d been participating in the
MetaFilter
discussions; since I came in at the end, I have the luxury of instant
hindsight, and a bit of disconnection to give me perspective. And of course, I never saw anything from “Kaycee” that wasn’t on the weblog, so I wasn’t as drawn in as Al or the BWG were.
Even though Kaycee was a hoax,
I learned some things about myself and about the value of getting the
most from every day by reading “her” story; for those, I am grateful.
I probably wouldn’t have paid any attention to a similar story if I’d
known it was fiction — I don’t watch disease-of-the-week stories on TV,
either.
I haven’t read anyone else’s comments on this topic yet, other than the
first couple of postings on the MetaFilter thread and the pointers from
Dan Gillmor’s page.
Now it’s time to go see what you’ve said already.
What I did with my weekend
We actually had an unusual weekend — we made two visits to the local
temple of commerce (Valley Fair Mall), more than we usually make in a
season. Saturday, after spending the morning at Torah Study and
services at Shir Hadash, we couldn’t decide what to have for lunch, so
we decided to try out the new and improved food court at Valley Fair so
we wouldn’t have to agree on one type of food (it’s hard to use the word
“cuisine” on food-court food). Then on Sunday, we went back to buy
Jeffrey some shoes and look for a curtain rod to replace the one in our
bedroom. We succeeded in the first mission, but curtain rods are too
mundane for Valley Fair, and I wound up going to Orchard Supply Hardware
instead.
Saturday, we also saw
Cyrano
at San Jose Rep; it was an excellent
performance (especially by John Hansen as Cyrano). The ending made me
think of Kaycee, in fact — but that, of course, was before I knew the
truth.
Sunday afternoon, we installed the new curtain rod. Boy, I love home
maintenance!
Catching up on missed links