Day 111 - Send a Virtual Message in a Bottle

Date: April 27th, 2010

I don't know if y'all can tell from the tone of the entries over the course of the last couple days, but the stress of finals is starting to get to me a little.  I deal interestingly with the stress of finals.  Usually I do odd things like dress in a full length robe and backwards baseball cap and pose for pictures in my room.  Then there was the year that I walked to Main St. in pajamas at 4am so I could go to the Fleetwood (so a little past Main St. actually).  This one time I spent an hour laying on my bedroom floor, staring at the ceiling just to feel the flatness on my back.

The point is, finals get my goose.  This year's impact has been twofold.  The first thing that happened was that I thought it would be a good idea to watch "Ancient Aliens" on the History Channel.  It made the non-crazy version of Scientology seem like a good idea.  The second is that my entries have been... less giddypants than usual.  Though I often delight in my own sarcasm, its also important to enjoy the lighter side of, ya know, paper citations, I guess.

Having noticed this less-than-pleasing trait in my recent entries, I decided to do something cute, short, and sweet.  I thought about what things we romanticize in the world.  As a society, we are just piles of romantic goo for things like secret admirers, flowers, lost love and feeling like we're connected to one another.  Don't get me wrong; I'm part of that proverbial goo myself, but when I'm studying for finals, human connection is less possible than usual.  There is only so much the History Channel can do to fulfill me.

I thought for a while about the old stories and myths we tell each other and it hit me that one of the most romantic, that I can think of, is the message in a bottle.  The long-lost-love, cast out to sea; the stranded traveler, sharing his last thoughts with the world; the brave explorer, sending messages home on the ocean currents; all are romantic ideas in their own right.  If only Ann Arbor weren't vaguely landlocked and I were not studying-locked.

Turns out none of that matters when you've got the interweb.  Granting the website I found is slightly less romantic than casting a bottle with a few choice words out to sea with no knowledge of where it will go, it was still a lovely break.  The site I found is called OceanGram and it allows you to write out a little note and cast it into the virtual sea.  Then, if you stay on the site for a few minutes, a bottle from a faraway land will arrive at the shore for you to read.  Here's the message I sent:

"Hi to whoever get this.  Here's hoping your days are joyful and sunny and your nights are peaceful.  Much love."

I know.  I'm freakin' poetic over here.

I decided to wait for a few minutes and see what came in.  Once I got a few bottles, I realized mine was about on par as far as the poetry of the whole thing goes.  I also realized, after seeing someone date their message like this: 19/4/2010, that I had just read a message sent by someone overseas.  I love that.  Its exactly the break I was hoping for.  I got to relax, be silly and have that moment of realization that, at some point in the last week, someone thousands of miles away sat at their computer and typed a message not knowing who would see it.

I was so happy I left the site running in the background when I went back to studying.  There's a little foghorn noise that goes off when a bottle washes ashore.  About ten minutes later, I heard the foghorn go off and clicked over to see a bottle bobbing up and down in a vast, flash-animated ocean.  This was the message it had: "Will you join me barefoot on the beach?"

I would be lying if I said my heart didn't skip a little beat.  Now, before you haul me off to the nuttery, hear me out.  I know it wasn't to me, but seeing a romantic message, cast adrift in a bottle at sea still gave me the romantic goosebumps I was hoping for.  It struck me that to feel things like that, you just have to defeat cynicism.  I could sit here and scoff at someone who gets giddy from a message on a website or I could get a little smile to myself at the idea that romance is still alive and then get back to work.  I choose the latter.