In my frustration yesterday, I pulled a classic Joanna, which is to say that I oversimplified what I know to be a complicated and layered problem.

I do know why I tweet about LOST and post Facebook status updates about the books that I’m reading rather than about our financial woes: It’s because that is what I am thinking about at the moment, what I do want to discuss with others. I’m not walking around in a permanent state of depression. Most of the time, I am downright cheerful, because I don’t want to dwell on the negative aspects in my life right now, and I’m sure that you don’t, either. We all started doing online stuff as a form of entertainment and escapism, so it’s not really fair for me to expect that when you get 10 or 20 minutes in your busy schedule to hop online, you spend that time pouring out your heart about everything that is going on with you. No, of course you choose to keep it light-hearted instead. I understand.

Over the summer, I read MFK Fisher’s STAY ME, OH COMFORT ME, which is a selection of her journal entries from 1933-41. Like me, you’re probably more familiar with her food writing—How to Cook a Wolf, The Gastronomical Me, The Art of Eating—but these journal entries were written at the height of the Depression, several years before she started a professional writing career. At the beginning of the collection, she and her husband are living in California with her family, trying to find some work, doing odd jobs for family and friends of family to make a few extra dollars, and then having small dinner parties with friends, stretching every dollar, splurging occasionally on a nice bottle of liquor. But although every journal entry mentions a new plan for how she or her husband can make some money, the bulk of the writing is about enjoying simple pleasures and making fanciful plans for her future. I loved reading it and related to it so deeply.

I’m sorry if anything I wrote yesterday made anyone feel defensive, or like I was accusing anyone of not being his or herself. That wasn’t my intention. Keep fighting the good fight! You’re awesome.

This morning, I can’t stop thinking about the disconnect between the online and real world. Could this be because I’m currently reading World Leader Pretend (by local Portland author James Bernard Frost), which is about characters escaping their disappointing lives and choosing to spend all of their free time in World of Warcraft-esque online worlds instead, where they have a much higher chance of being successful? Yeah, okay, that is part of it. I would like to believe that I don’t relate to that plot very much, but I work from home and 99% of my interaction with my friends is through Facebook and Twitter status updates, blog posts, and occasional emails. And 1/4 of those friends are people I’ve never met in person. I’d much rather be meeting up with all of my pals at a local restaurant, or flying my family down to Texas a couple of  times a year, but I can’t afford that right now. I can barely afford groceries.

So it’s a real problem in my life that my friends and I continue to maintain pleasant, downright chirpy online personas while many of us are going through hardships in our personal lives, since I am depending on that form of communication to know what’s going on with them. Why am I tweeting about LOST when I don’t know how I’ll make the next mortgage payment? Do I need everything to look the same to the outside viewer to maintain my sanity as I struggle through one of the hardest times I’ve ever faced, or would it be so much better if I could just commiserate with people? We are all going through this. If you still have the job that you had two years ago, bully to you, but statistics tell me that most of you don’t. So why aren’t we talking about it online?