Old Friends...

It is natural that when you move, you may lose a few friends along the way.  There are some friendships that require your presence to be maintained.  And some friendships that survive the distance, and which may also survive infrequent contact.  Time, often, is the only way to tell which friendships will be which.

Some old friends, though, frankly you are glad to be away from, and you hope they'll lose your number, your e-mail, and forget how to contact you.

Tonight, one of my old friends, nonetheless, whom I was hoping to leave behind has seemed to catch up with me.  Yes, that's right, my old friend insomnia.... My how I've missed you.  NOT.  You could have stayed back in the U.S.  Nothing here in Canada requires your presence.  You may move on, my friend, and return from whence you came.

Insomnia when you're single and when you live alone looks different than insomnia when you're with someone else.  First of all, when you're alone, and you toss and turn in your bed, at least you aren't keeping someone else awake.  Second of all, then, you can stay in your own bed while you wait for insomnia to be on its way.

Sharing a bed with someone else means that there is a moment when you finally decide you can't be helping her sleep, and if you're going to continue to be wide awake, well, then, you might want to be nice to the one you sleep with and go some place else to be wide awake.  Trouble is, of course, is half the time they realize you've gotten up and left, and you may not have solved anything.  Except, of course, you can blog in peace without worrying about the tip tap of fingers on the keyboard waking them further and making them wonder when the hell you're gonna fall asleep so they can too.

In the time that has passed while trying to fall asleep, my mind has wandered in many different directions.  But I will spare you those wanderings.

Suffice to say, my old friend, I wish you'd stayed back in the old place.  And with that, my eyes begin to droop...

Anonymity - Revisited

So, I continue to struggle with this issue.  I'm making new friends on Twitter - some of whom say that they feel strange calling me "Borg" (I don't understand why?) and want my real name.  And then there's my friends from real life who wonder what I'm up to, and I want to share with them that I have this crazy life on Twitter that I'm enjoying, and I am working on this increasingly popular anonymous blog.

(Okay, maybe "popular" might be a stretch, but it's "popularity" IS increasing... I have Blogger stat charts to show!!)

Today, I took a leap of faith, and told another IRL friend about the blog.  She doesn't live in the small town, so she won't recognize all of the characters... Most of the stuff she already knows about... But, still...

This balancing between two worlds is kinda weird and fragile. 

But if I hope to be as popular as Jenny, one day, and have that book deal and all, that wall will eventually come crumbling down.

Just not today...

Tribe

Last week (or has it been two weeks?) during The Bloggess Book Club, she expressed her happiness at finally having found her Tribe.   Since then the "Lawsbians" movement has taken off.  The Tribe figures that if we enjoy The Bloggess, than, at a minimum we have a quirky enough sense of humor to enjoy each other, too.

But this finding of our Tribe hits upon so many other common issues.  Finding our Tribe suggests, perhaps, we weren't already within our Tribe to begin with.  It hints at the feeling of being "outsiders" so many of us feel.

Last night, I admit, I was watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show.  Of particular relevance to this post, I watched Episode 7 of Season 1 - Toulousse Lautrec is One of my Favorite Artists.  In this episode, she interviews a wonderful author for a news segment, and then he asks her out for dinner.  When they both get off their chairs, she realizes how short he is, and then tries to be sensitive in all that she says next to him, finding herself blundering with inadvertent "short" references.  Not aided, of course, by her friend Rhoda, who refers to him as a shrimp when he's out of the room, so that when he comes back, Mary introduces him to Rhoda as Eric Shrimp.

In the meantime, in the course of the show and their spending evenings together getting to know each other, Eric finishes his second book, which he leaves for Mary to read.  It is all about how we all feel like outsiders.  He has this line, that I'll paraphrase badly, but you can hit the link above, and as long as Hulu has it, you can watch it for yourself.  He talks about high school, and how there was this one guy who was the captain of the football team, class president, and he may even have suggested he was top of the class.  And there was this one girl.  She was captain of the cheer squad, class secretary and dating the captain of the football team.  Those two people, he said, were the only ones who were actually happy in high school. 

Facebook - as much as Tweeps may diss it - has been a remarkable tool for reconnecting with people you used to know.  (Maybe Gotye should try it?).  I definitely felt on the outside in high school.  And so, when I left, there were only about two or three people I actually kept in touch with, and I never attended a reunion.  I got on Facebook the year of our twentieth reunion, and in those early stages, you clicked "Accept" on anyone whose name you recognized before you learned to filter.  And I had the opportunity prior to the reunion to actually get to know some people from my class that I hadn't been close to.  Who seemed, from the distance, to be popular and happy and well accepted at school.  And then, to learn, that they, too, were miserable in high school and felt like outsiders.

Then, since I was in town at the time, I went to my twentieth reunion.  And ran into more former class-mates who seemed like they were part of the "in" crowd only to discover they felt like they were on the outside, too.

I think we tend to underestimate our place within society and our community, and perhaps, to over-estimate others.  Twitter provides a remarkable ability to feel "closer" to celebrities and perhaps not their innermost thoughts, but their most random thoughts that they share with the thousands who follow them.  Not surprising, their tweets aren't too much different than ours.  Not surprising, their tweets often express their own insecurities, their own desire for acceptance, their own search for community and their place.  In some ways, it has to be harder for them, because we have all placed them way up high on a pedestal, outside the normal realm of society. 

But the reality is that our common denominator is that we're all human.  We all want to belong.  And so many of us often feel that we don't belong. 

Don't assume that the person next to you feels a part of your community.  The healthiest churches I have been in encourage parishioners to greet and get to know the person sitting on the pew next to them.  You can't assume that the person there feels like they belong until you let them know that they belong.  Just as you often feel out of place yourself.

I admit, I have felt that since I found Twitter, I have found "my people".  Y'all laugh at my jokes, enquire about my pain, and read my blog and ideally enjoy it (more comments to confirm doesn't hurt my self esteem or ego!)  But the reality is that we are all part of one big tribe.  The Tribe of Humanity.  You will be assimilated.  Resistance is futile.

The Art of Happiness

In the book "by" the Dalai Lama discussing the art of happiness, one of the keys to happiness is quite simple:  increase the number of things in your life that bring you pleasure, and decrease the things in your life that don't.  (I use "by" because the book is written by this other guy, clearly in his own voice, about his discussions with the Dalai Lama on this topic, so the underlying ideas are his, but ... well, that's more than you need to know)

Yes, I'm simplifying things, and I don't think the Dalai Lama will mind too much because he seems to think that the secrets to life are very simple, so...

This weekend I had a stark reminder of how that works.  One of the group of friends I went to visit, I have known since college.  Let's just say that time has not been her friend.  And I wonder, as I type now, if she was as bitter in college when I first knew her as she is now, and I just didn't notice and it's be amplified by time, or if this is something life has given her in the last 20 or so years.

Because she is not a happy person.  And, as the Dalai Lama instructs, I do feel compassion for her.  I wish I could find some way to uplift her mood or outlook on life, but I do realize, at the end of the day, that's not my job or responsibility.  Or perhaps, sadly, possible. 

There was a group of us all together, so we didn't always spend all our time all together.  And in reflecting about the weekend, I find that I really enjoyed the time this weekend when she wasn't around, and I really didn't enjoy the time this weekend when she was present.  Now, I hate reaching that conclusion.  It saddens me tremendously.  But, I also respect and acknowledge it. 

And I realize that I will limit the responses to invitations from this friend to small bits and not large ones like a full weekend in the future.  I will meet them for dinner, where I can escape after a lovely meal catching up.  But I will not plan on spending a long evening with them where I feel trapped and unable to escape her negativity. 

I'm not sure I can necessarily capture in any greater detail or specificity what it was about her demeanor this weekend that turned me off so much, and I'm not sure for the purpose of this post that I need to.  But I did appreciate the CLEAR illustration of the Dalai Lama's principle of reducing or removing things in your life that do not bring you happiness.

Share your stories about toxic people in your life, and think about who you might need to spend less time around in order to be happy and not dragged down to their level of unhappiness.

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Cyber Stalking

Raise your hands.  Who does it?  C'mon, we all do it.  That's what makes the internet so fascinating - seeing what we can see about others.  Being voyeurs into others lives - or what they or their friends share with us. 

How many of us use filters on Facebook? (Are there even filters on Twitter??)

How many of us have no idea what is out there in the ether about us?

Just spent a half hour tracking an old friend, and her husband, and catching up on her life.  In the old days, didn't we used to pick up the phone? I'll confess, we rarely wrote letters, but perhaps drop an e-mail?  Let them tell us what they want to share with us?  And yet, if you sent me an e-mail and asked me how my life was going, as some friends still do, I would say that there's not much to report.  And yet, clearly, I do have a lot to say and share.  This is why social networking - capturing our lives as we go - can be so helpful in finding out what is really going on.

I have a friend who has an elaborate set of filters on Facebook.  She's really thought through the friend lists, etc.  I'd tell you how many friends she has to filter through, but she wisely has those protected, too.  If the iPhone app would let you select multiple lists when posting from the mobile app, I might be a bit more invested.  I might be a bit more careful with what I post to whom.

I've recently found myself on the outside end of a filter with a friend, and it sucks.  I know that she's posting, but I can't see it now.  Every once in awhile I am with a mutual friend, and when she is looking at Facebook, I can see the posts.  I can see that she is in the inner circle. 

My first Facebook account was created for business.  I was trying to find someone for a client.  This was well before I ended my marriage, and while it was supposed to be a professional account, it quickly became personal as I discovered all of these old friends I hadn't seen in forever.  Some, yes, we might question whether they ever were friends, and some have become friends.  Then I separated from my spouse (that's the sanitized version) and created a separate Facebook account for those who truly were close friends so that they could know that I was okay, and so I didn't have to keep updating people all of the time.

It is an odd thing when you're going through a significant event in your life with everyone asking about it.  It feels nice to have the support but it is hard to let go of the - in this case bad - when you're always forced to rehash it.  But maybe that's a post for another day.

So, initially the new Facebook account was a filter in and of itself.  I only shared it with select people.

It has been hard as I have moved on and grown to let go of that mentality. 

Facebook and Twitter are different. Twitter is a popularity contest - you want as many people to follow you as you can find.  Some have viewed Facebook as a popularity contest, too, racking up "friends" as if they were points in some game.  I've never found myself interested in doing that, and yet, sometimes, with the newly developed friendship with old acquaintances, I wonder what I might be missing out on.

Ah, this is a rambling entry (I will have a few of these).  But catching up on my friend's life.  Missing her and wishing she were sharing it directly with me has got me rambling. 

How many of you stalk?  How many of you truly connect via social networking?  I am getting to know a few of you through Twitter.. 140 characters at at time and a few more when you comment here.

Tell me your social networking stories.  Tell me your cyber-stalking stories.


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Shower-Time

I must admit there is something about lathering my hair in the shower with shampoo that seems to massage the creative writing juices in me.  I can create these incredibly well-worded pieces to be written, but like dreams, they seem to fade quickly as soon as I exit the shower. 

I have begun, actually, keeping a dream journal.  It is crazy what little tidbits from the previous day seem to enter into our subconscious and manifest themselves in our nocturnal wanderings. 

One of the reasons I began keeping the dream journal was after a colleague commented about one of my dreams connecting it to another dream I told her about earlier that I, now, had no memory remaining of such dream or telling her about it.  That she, someone who I thought I kept at somewhat of a distance, was able to recall and connect my dreams suggested that I, too, might want to collect and connect my dreams to each other.

I have a very vivid dream cycle lately.  So vivid, in fact, that it's hard to wake up and go wherever it is I need to go next.  So vivid, in fact, that I look forward to afternoon naps much as a kid looks forward to his tv time when he gets home from school.  Sometimes I remember the dreams after, and often, I don't. 

Much like my shower thoughts. 

This morning, for instance, inspired by some random comment about Thomas Jefferson writing 19,000 letters, I constructed this long detailed framework for a snail mail correspondence to a friend of mine who had sent me a letter last fall by mail that I had not responded to, yet, in the same form.  Don't worry, she knows I'm still alive.  We are, after all, Facebook friends.  We've even spoken on the phone and I acknowledged how wonderful it was to get her letter, and my regret at not having yet responded in kind. 

So, in the shower this framework of a letter forms.  The first introductory paragraphs, apologizing for the delay in writing, and how much I love and enjoy the form of writing are written whole as I rub-a-dub-dub.  And then all the areas of my life that I want to share with her - lost loves, unrequited loves, unavailable loves (wait, there seems to be a pattern developing here) as well as my hum-drum every day life, begin to form. 

In the shower, I dream up this vivid rich correspondence.  The letter will be ten pages typed by the time I'm done.  I am so inspired that even though I got in the shower so that I could move forward with a different task I need to do today, I felt compelled to sit down - still in my towel - and begin this epic letter that I had dreamed up in my shower.

"Dear xxx," it began so originally. 

Then I crafted this inelegant paragraph:

"The last time I tried to write you via snail mail, I did it by hand, and I think that was part of the cause of failure.  I type much more easily than I do write by hand.  And, fortunate for you, it is much more legible when I type."

That was not quite how I had mastered it - or clearly NOT mastered it - in the shower.  And then, all of the rest of what I wanted to write, while I sit here in front of my laptop in only my towel, disappeared.  And I stared at the remaining blank "page" on the screen.

You know there is that moment when you wake up from a dream when it is so vivid and fresh in your mind you think you'll never forget it.  Boy are you wrong.  Even by the time I manage to open up a place to write it down, it has already begun to fragment.  Sometimes all I can get down are things I hope / think will trigger memories of pieces of it.

"Saw Dad." 

No memory of what Dad was doing, or why he was in there, but I remember that much.  And I remembered it with such intensity, that the fact that it stuck after it faded must mean it's important.

I am brilliant in the shower.  I am a virtuoso of words in the shower. 

But by the time I get here, so often, it has faded.

I know, now, that I will not finish that letter.  That despite the shower-time inspiration, clarity, intensity of the mission, it will not get written.  At least not as I had envisioned it there.  Perhaps another shower another day may inspire me past: "you're lucky I'm typing this because my handwriting sucks" inspiration.

Or perhaps, it will, instead, inspire another brilliant blog entry.

I try to capture my shower inspirations, much as I capture my dreams.  Because I believe if I string them together they may have some meaning.  But maybe, in the end, they will just be fragments.  I'll never know, though, if I don't step back and look at them as a whole.

Read on...

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If you like this, stick around and read other entries. Hit a few on the right that are favorites, or go to the home page of the blog, and read from beginning to end. Take a moment to send me some feedback. Thanks for coming. Please come back soon.

Resistance is Futile

Despite the title, this will not be a blog about science fiction. 

Well, not totally. 

I have discovered, to my surprise, that I am apparently a science fiction fan.  In college, special interest groups would be allowed to gather together to pool housing priority points and get suites where people of like interests could live together.  On the floor I lived on my freshman year, the Sci Fi club had a suite.  I became best friends with many of those folks, but never identified myself as part of the Science Fiction group. 

Until recently. 

Facebook is a part of my life.  I resisted it for awhile.  I originally only went on to try and find someone for a client of mine from a Google search, but then found old friends.  I got hooked.  Recently, I found a cache of folks from college.  Frankly, if you'd asked me before the Facebook age, I wouldn't have said I kept many friends from college - just a handful.  But last night I created a group of just my friends from college to pass along a reference to our school in pop-culture, and discovered I have 20 Facebook friends - or over 10% of my "friends" - from college. 

At least half of these are recent entries and reconnects in the past year.  Someone from the Sci Fi group found me, and then invited me to their private page.  And then others found me.  I discovered - quite belatedly - that I did belong.  I may never have been a card-carrying member.    But when I looked at the posted pictures from college, I was in over half of them.  I cannot tell you who have been all of the Dr. Whos (what is the grammatical formation of the plural of Dr. Who?), and I do NOT (I repeat, I DO NOT) speak Klingon. 

But I am a fan of science fiction.  I couldn't help but be with my brother enjoying it himself as a youngster.  He was a great Star Trek fan, and I saw Star Wars for the first time in the theater with him and his friends.  They tried to scare me by telling my father was Darth Vader (and this was the original - *before* we learned that he was Luke's father).  My Hulu playlist will show that I am a fan of Warehouse 13, Eureka, Misfits, Firefly, Quantum Leap, and Being Erica, amongst others.  My college house-mates and I would religiously gather to watch the weekly broadcast of ST:TNG, and caught up where we had missed on the regular daily re-runs. 

I cannot hide.  Resistance is futile.