Abi had sent me a picture of Barney wearing a cone and looking pathetic, but still no word from Rachel.
“Well, Vivian, today is the first day of the rest of your life,” I said as I opened my laptop. I’d mainly done Instagram while at the wine event, and there were some advantages over recording for YouTube even if Insta wasn’t as easy as I’d thought. Often, I’d taken thirty pictures just to get one that might look right on Instagram. It was a different kind of frustration.
After some deliberation over YouTube versus Instagram, I spent the morning making a video about “Lucky’s Adventures and Subsequent Return.” She was less than cooperative because, well, cat.
My wine country videos would have to wait. I simply didn’t have the bandwidth to edit those at the moment. The shipment from Vine Friends hadn’t arrived yet anyway, and I wanted to intersperse footage from California with wine tastings at home—preferably with friends.
If I still had those.
Restless, I decided to check out the responses to the survey I’d posted before my trip while eating a lunch of stale tortilla chips and sadness.
This channel started off cool, but now it’s boring.
What happened to Mr. Always? I want to see more stories about him.
Maybe you should just beg your husband to take you back because I think you’ve run out of ideas.
It’s fine.
You curse and drink too much.
What happened to the crafts? Now it’s all about parties and you showing off.
On and on they continued in this vein. It felt like a completely different audience had answered my survey. I flipped over to the Lucky video to check the comments there and was awash in cognitive dissonance.
Yay!
I’m so glad she came home!
God is good!
I’m so glad Lucky’s home!
Did Mr. Always find her?
I toggled from those comments to the survey and back to the video comments, then back to the survey ...
When people are anonymous, they’re either truthful or mean or both.
I wanted a hole to form in my office, and I wanted the hole to swallow me up.
A part of me had always known that the people cheering me on weren’t entirely sincere, at least not all of them. But Mom had warned me. She’d told me that this was anillusionof success.
Abi wasn’t mad at me for my videos; she was probably mad because I hadn’t stopped by to see Barney. If she was mad at all. Maybe I was projecting that emotion on her while she was really just worried about her dog.
And Rachel? She had good reason to be mad at me; I had possibly gotten her fired. Not intentionally, of course, but when it comes to getting fired, do intentions matter?
Mom? She had every reason to be mad at me as well. Letting Lucky out of the house had been an accident. She’d dropped everything to come help me, and I’d hardly said thank you. Even worse, I’d made fun of her in a public forum.
That was before I factored in how Dylan had found out about his parents’ lack of a sex life through a video. Or even how I’d caused Mitch to lose patients.
He had clearly been in the wrong, but two wrongs did not make a right.
I had given up honest-to-goodness friends and alienated my family on a quest for positive comments from strangers. If I continued in this vein, I would end up like Larry and Moe, ridiculing newcomers while jockeying for viewers and likes and shares as if life were a zero-sum game.
My email pinged. I would’ve ignored the banner except it mentioned Google AdSense, and those were the people who were going to be paying me. I eagerly switched over to email and read how my first payment wouldn’t actually be hitting my bank account for another three weeks because all payments were a month behind,but... that whopping payment would be $217.14.
I laughed.
