At the end of the day, I sent Louise my summary.

😄: my professor offered to have me keep working on our summer research project! and will continue to be paid 🤑

😞: grandmother misplaced her dentures and we spent all afternoon looking for them. it turned out they were in the basil plant

It was taking her longer to reply these days. Her semester was starting, and she had volleyball. I wondered if she would make time for me once the season really got going and she had to travel for games. After all, there was less reason for her to talk to me now.

She always got back to me eventually with her summary.

😞: congrats about the summer research and the $$!! but sorry about the denture hunt, that sounds really hard

😄: im finally feeling good about changing my major

I’m starting to notice a trend with our summaries. Most of the time, she uses hers as an opportunity to ask me about mine, avoiding answering any questions regarding her own life. I always thought of her as open because she has so much data out on the internet and she’s so easy to talk to, so enthusiastic. But if I were a machine learning model meant to give a rating to each message on how much information it offered the other person, my score would be much higher than hers. Even though I consider myself private, as I scrolled through our earlier comments, I was surprised to see how much I shared. The one where I told her that grandmother had Alzheimer’s was enough to rate higher than all of her messages combined.

What did I really know about Louise? My thumb flicked through the screen again. I knew she played volleyball and that she was working on changing majors. But I did not even know the new major she was considering. No more than I knew after meeting with her in person. I decided to change that.

congrats to you, too! what’s the new major called?

I don’t have a name for it yet . . . will let you know when I do!

Another dodgy answer. I guess all this journaling and Prof. Loganisms have started to change the way I think, since I suddenly wondered—why not be honest more often, especially with those I cared about? Why dodge and hide when we’re all just people trying to reach one another? Shouldn’t I, once again an EMBRS engineer, embrace radical sharing in real life? If I shared more openly, maybe she would too. So I texted.

I really enjoy talking to you