Place of Refuge

Place of Refuge

19 June 2010

Who Needs A Second Life?


ok, Makropoulos is back,
and she is pissed.




Makropoulos, for those of you who don't know,
is the personality I channel
when I have time to channel.
Makropoulos is a woman who has been alive for 420 years,
or some ungodly period of time like that,
doomed to wander the earth
in a body that's say, roughly
24 years old
Though, I should tell you,
after this period of time
it's starting to show some age.



Anyway,
I'm back,


and I have to comment on this
phenomenon
called
Second Life




I went onto Second Life the other night--
I thought it would be a cool place to be
Makropoulos,
and perhaps it could be a cool place to be
Makropoulos,
but they wouldn't let me take that name!

So that was my first problem in Second Life --

I really dug the body I got to choose,
but I couldn't figure out how to change
my clothes.  My Second Life Self somehow got dressed in
this stupid flippy little teenaged dress
that I just wouldn't be caught dead in.

And I couldn't figure out how to change it,
but I did determine:
the options they offered me were,
well, not exactly the styles I would like to wear.

 
That was my Second Problem with Second Life --

and then I got stuck wandering through all these 
precontrived places, precontrived
in someone else's brain,
and not even half as interesting
as the rest of the real world really is.


I mean, honestly, gang,
I've lived in the rest of the world:
I've lived in London,
France,
Germany,
Greece,
Turkey, 
Thailand,
Canada,
India,
and most recently,
the United States of America,


and when you put the effect of living
in those places,
as well as travelling to many other places,
multiple times,
alongside the world of 
Second Life,
well, one of them pales,
and it isn't the planet we live on.



That's the truth.

So, that was my Third Problem with Second Life


But that also takes me to the thing
I really liked
about Second Life:
the first person I met was French.

I was being so lazy, using English - I mean,
that's been my primary language for 
over 100 years,
and when her first sentence was French,
I was at first quite surprised,
and then I realized,
that Second Life is a place
that requires
Second Languages,
not to mention
Third of Fourth
Languages.
Because
people in Second Life could be from
anywhere.
Second Life gets rid of those
geographical boundaries, and puts us
all together, in one
space without time and space.
Well, to say the least,
I struggled with my French.
I mean, I haven't used it for nearly
100 years.

And then I began thinking:
I'd better brush up on my German,
And my Spanish,
and my Turkish,
if I really want to get around
in Second Life.
(or even in blog life)

That is the First Good Thing,
and perhaps
THE BEST THING
about Second Life.

I was struggling with flying,
since I have a Mac,
and loving the idea of flying,
 but getting more and more frustrated
by a very essential feature of Second Life-
the avatar itself.

After I excused myself from the French
woman, who I must applaud
for struggling with English,
while I struggled with French,
(her parting statement to me 
was "kiss")

anyway, after that rather
sweet encounter, I found
myself catapulted from one
mediocre Second Life 
location to the next,
until I seemed to get stuck 
in one, where I finally
found other players who
spoke English, and one
dashing male avatar walked
up to me and said: did you see 
anyone around here?
There's some people
behind me, I said,
and he said: yeah,
I know them. But is
there anyone else?
(as if to say: I know 
them; they bore me;
I'm looking for the 
cool folks, and I said

"I don't know; I'm a stranger here myself."

And he said "yeah,
me too," then went
dashing away,
looking for someone
else, not me.


And I thought: 

crap, I could do that in my First Life.



This gets me to the Fourth Problem With Second Life,
and the Reason I Won't Do It Again, for awhile:

You see, I feel that I'm already
in an avatar. 
This body,
I live in,
is my earthly
avatar,
it's the form I chose
to use for 
this stretch of time
on this earthly domain.

I have enough trouble,
and enough fun,
negotiating this earthly
avatar,
why the hell would I need another?



Sure:
some people may act out
their wildest fantasies,
their real self,
in the Second
World, and 
(and perhaps because)
they actually believe
this Earth
is the First World,

when in actual
fact
Earth is the Second Life.

Second Life for me
is a Third Life
that I really don't need.
After all my time
on this Earthly Plane,
I've come to realize
that when you're damned
to eternal life on this Second Life Planet,
which I am,
you would be in torment,
if you did not always live it
as your true self.

So for me,
I am true to my fantasy self
-my real, Other self-
in this life,
 all the time,
knowing that THIS
is the Second Life.
THIS is the place
where we've been required
to get it right.
the first time,
the only time,
so when we head back
to the First Life,
the only life,
the eternal life,
we know the following things:

what it is to be good,
what it is to be bad,
and what it is to know the difference,
and what it is to say: "that's too bad" or
"that's too good."  The eternal life
that knows all these things,
is the perfect life,
and that's what I am 
striving for.


World Without End. 



freakingnews  )

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