Category: Uncategorized

A New Kind of Prayer Ceremony

palm_tree_2Tonight is ‘palm’ night. Not palm as in the palm of hand, nor palm as in a personal digital assistant Tonight we are planning something to take the frigid edge off, and just in case you’re interested, here are the instructions:

  1. Take one household palm tree and set it on the dining room table
  2. Pretend the mounds of snow outside are really dunes of pristine white sand.
  3. Put on and listen to Beach Boys CD
  4. Cut up a coconut
  5. Cut up a pineapple
  6. Drink coconut milk
  7. Make and drink Pina coladas
  8. Eat coconut meat and fresh pineapple
  9. Run sink water and pretend it is ocean waves
  10. Go to Weather.com and check the weather for St. Croix
  11. Go take a hot and steamy shower
  12. Give up snow for Lent
  13. Pray for spring

Social Media = Perfect People

100_0263I have been unofficially studying social media since it first came on the scene: first it was MySpace, then along came Facebook and now Twitter and myriad others. As a result, I am developing a gnawing discomfort with social media even though I quasi- participate in my platforms of choice:  Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and StumbleUpon. I should say ‘sort of’ participate as I am weening myself and this essay explains why.

Let it first be said – social media is addictive. Let it second be said – not a damn thing on any of these platforms is real, and that’s what so disturbs me.  When we are ‘on Facebook,’ we’re not living in three-dimensional reality. We’re engaging in one dimension with people who aren’t real because all the gritty, grimy, ugly stuff that makes a person whole is lost among cheery witticisms and snappy snapshots. On social media we become something else. We measure success in the number of friends or followers we have. We lose our real selves among  paint pretty pictures and clever repartee. The implications of this for the future are quite scary indeed.

I read an interesting report recently that claims those of us using Facebook to look up people are actually stalking them! Another report claims that many people become depressed from Facebook. No surprise here because comparing oneself to ‘perfect people’ is indeed demoralizing.

Finally, time spent on social media is time away from interacting with people or engaging in other greater good activities. If you’ve ever seen the movie Wall E, one of my favorite movies of all time, people in the future become fat, unable to walk, and spend their days lying on magically-propelled lounge chairs and talking on video-phones all day. They never engage with one another face-to-face and actually become rather useless. (Though there is a happy ending 🙂 Is this where we’re headed? Into a world where people create false selves that populate platforms where nothing is real and the skills of basic human interaction are lost?WALL_E_fat_chair

As you can see, I’m hot on this topic and agonizing over a decision to close out my accounts and get back to living more simply.

P.S. – I don’t count my blog as social media.

Motel 6

Motel6logoMotel 6: A man was found dead there the other day. Suspicious circumstances, they say. It is a seedy place. I know. There was a time, not too long ago, when I put my daughter up in that same seedy hotel. She was dying. She was an alcoholic and she had failed countless detox and rehab programs. They knew her at all the ERs and it hurt me when they laughed, scoffed, scolded and said, “Here’s our girl,” only they didn’t mean it in a kind way.

This had my stunningly gorgeous, stop-shouldered, brilliant baby become: lying in her bed day after day, a bed soiled with her own urine and occasionally, feces. She became a shadow of her former self – a walking skeleton, when she could walk.

The calls always came in the middle of the night. “Come, I need you.” “I’m sick, I’m going to die.” The voice always slurred. I went. Always. Until I didn’t. Well, I did, but instead of bringing her home for one more session of enabling, I did what they all told me to do – all the experts, all my friends, all the family. I did “tough love”. My form of tough love. I knew I needed to quit rescuing, quit saving, quit enabling but I wasn’t going to turn her out to the streets. I took her to Motel 6.

My skin crawled when I walked her down the hallway full of greasy heads sticking out doorways slurring taunts, cigarettes dangling from lips or held in dirty hands, most unlit. We opened the door to her grimy depressing little room. I hugged her. She held me tight. I held her tighter. I turned before she could see the rising torrent in my eyes. “I love you Mom,” she said in a surprisingly sober voice. “I love you more, Lovey,” I choked and ran to get out of that sleazy, squalid place where I left my baby because I was practicing “tough love.”

Did the man’s mother take him there too? Was she practicing the tough love everyone told her to do? Why did my girl live and hers didn’t?

Motel 6: I drive by you often, certainly not purposefully, only because you are one route or another. You almost sucked in my little girl and swallowed her whole, but I thank God, she was stronger than you.

Requiem to Winter

20130210_131924I am dazzled by the almost-blinding sparkle of snow as I walk my little dog on this late winter afternoon.  On our walk on this day, with the temperature hovering round 20 degrees, we are warmed by our brisk pace and the growing power of the sun’s rays. We are also encased in the glow of pure sunlight reflected off  pristine snow. It is simply put:  glorious.

Everywhere I go, people are complaining about this winter and wishing it away. They are yearning for the mild, mealy-mouth, wimpy winters of recent years, winters where I have yearned for the drama of a good old fashioned winter. This is it: a winter filled with winter. I am not wishing it away. .

I love these walks on days like this as well as the drama of a storm with its howling wind and swirling snow. I love curling up in cozy rooms with roaring fires,  snuggling on the couch with the dogs and lots of good books. I love getting my exercise by shoveling our driveway – sometimes two or three times in a single day!

Soon the maple syrup will be running and the sweet smell of it boiling will perfume the air. Soon the ice will go under in the Finger Lakes – swallowed up all at once into the depths as the cold water beneath emerges to the top. Soon the snow will melt from the lawns and gardens and the earth will have that rusty, vibrant smell that only fresh mud has and soon the geese will be moving, their honking a distant reminder that we’re moving from late winter to early spring.

I will love this, too. All the subtle nuances and smells and celebrations. I love them all – the seasons and all the in-betweens. And through them all I will walk my little dog.

No Emerald City

Am I missing something?

Image courtesy Jessenewmar1990, The Wonderful Wiki of Oz
Image courtesy Jessenewmar1990, The Wonderful Wiki of Oz

I just read where the Federal Reserve cut their monthly bond purchases – an alleged indicator of a strengthening economy and I also just read how Intel is cutting jobs due to faltering PC sales. I also had a conversation today with a colleague – a Ph.D. in English who, despite major efforts to find something other than the low-paying, muck-raking adjunct jobs we have in academe – has come up with nada. Likewise is the plight of her Ph.D. in history husband.

Every time I hear the latest stats, I grind my teeth and clench my jaw with angst. I am convinced all the ‘good news’ about the economy is a government plot to goad us all into ceasing all job-hunting activity to make the numbers look good. Just think – if the economy is doing great, all these people are getting jobs, and I’m not, well, what would you do? Crawl off into the sunset and wait for Social Security to kick in, if it lasts that long …

Christine Sevilla’s Murder

Upside DownShe was my friend and now I am reading a book written about her murder. It is surreal. It is surreal because I knew her. I knew about her frustrations with her professor-husband. I knew about her devotion for her dog, Riley. I knew about her love for all things natural and her fierce commitment to keep what should be wild, wild. I knew her as a fellow anti-corporate zealot. I knew her as my friend.

In a city hardened by the report of ‘just another homicide,’ the clock stopped when Christine’s name was read on the news that night in November, her body dumped in one of my favorite spots, ironically named Devil’s Bathtub, a unique geological formation known as a ‘kettle hole’ formed by by a receding glacier. This unique, natural marvel was also one of her favorite spots.

Christine was murdered and body dumped by her husband whose aim was to kill ‘the pack,’ which besides Christine inclded Riley and himself. He got Christine, he tried to kill and injured Riley, and somehow wimped out on killing himself.

Riley survived. Tim is incarcerated in federal prison. Christine is gone but not forgotten.

The tragedy here is not only Christine’s murder, but what was found to be husband Tim’s psychosis. Chilling is the question this raises: how many people are living with their so-called ‘normal’ husbands, wives, sons, daughters? There is a quote on the back cover of Upside Down that captures the terrifying result of such unknowing:

“Trapped in the stygian depths of his psychosis, Wells saw only one solution…”

Being Morbid: Coming Clean

Today I am obsessed with a developing story here in my town – about a body found in the backyard of a home in a VERY trendy area. Last night a news bulletin was issued for a “Suspicious Condition” which, understandably, alarmed neighbors as well as other city residents. Today, it was announced the home is owned by a psychiatrist and that the ‘condition’ was the discovery of a body in its backyard. The body has been identified as a young man who has been missing since October.

Let me come out of the closet now and admit to being morbid. I mean VERY morbid. I have been like this for my whole life. I obsess and must find and read every gory detail of every horrific event, but my ‘specialty’ is plane crashes and car wrecks. My family and a few select friends are well-aware of my propensity towards the morbid, but I try to keep  this unflattering character flaw under cloak.

Back to the body in the shrink’s backyard. The house is kind of creepy looking and the possibility of additional bodies has also been whispered. Already, the primo local psychiatric hospital has renounced the shrink as having anything but very ‘loose’ connections with their organization. Interesting.  So, I am obsessed. As another writer colleague and fellow morbid soul-friend said, she was not going to get much work done today.

Let it be known that I am a writer and here is an interesting fact about my work. I don’t frequently swim in the waters of fiction very often as it intimidates the heck out of me. But mind you, whenever I start to write fiction – (right now I am writing a novel that started out to be Thelma and Louise meets One Flew Over the Cuckoos’ Nest but has quite purposefully morphed into One Flew Over the Cuckoos’ Nest meets Dracula), it goes  from funny and light to ghostly and supernatural all by itself!

There is a message here.

Duh …

Move over, Anne Rice!!

From: Scarygamesnow.com
From: Scarygamesnow.com

Digital Detox

Twitter_logo_blueI came upon this phrase this morning and instantly I knew I needed to write about it. If you read my previous blog, you’ll know I’m on a digital detour, or at least trying for one. In truth, despite my  moaning and groaning about being a digital diva in distress, I am not even able to master the two-thumbed smart phone input. The few times I’ve crafted a message this way, the person on the other end called to ask what I’d been drinking.

Anyway – the other day I told an old and dear friend that I had deactivated my Twitter account – not that I used it that much, really. Still, I was attempting to add some follows – I really focus on animal rights and rescue, news and inspirational type accounts – when they weren’t registering. Perplexed and pissed, a few moments of research later I discovered that once you hit the magic mark of following 2000, your account is locked from being able to follow anyone else. Other people can still follow you, but you can’t follow them. The rationale is to prevent spamming. The reality is I feel like a kid in a closet being punished for something I didn’t do.

Anyway, the bottom line – this 2000 follow limit is the catalyst for beginning my much needed digital detox plan. I shall now spend some quiet and snowy days culling through my technology maze in quest of a kinder and gentler place.

Thank you, Twitter.

Loss of Relationship?

100_0263“Social media complicates interpersonal relationships in that it can seduce the user into thinking that online and in-person communication are the same.”  

I came across this quote in my e-travels this afternoon and it stopped me dead in my tracks. It was like I was looking into the mirror of my own psyche, a psyche that has been wrestling with the meaning of social media and how it does/doesn’t, should/shouldn’t fit into my life and into the fabric of our society.

Let me first get one thing on the table. I use social media. I have Twitter, Facebook, Vine, Pinterest and Goodreads accounts. I probably have more I’m not remembering.   Let me get another thing out : I get lost in social media – often. And when I do, I hate myself. I hate myself because instead of learning and enriching myself, I’m off on some bunny trail, wasting time, seeing who did what to whom, and fooling myself into believing ‘this’ is the real world.

Is social media a bad thing?  I don’t like generalizations, but I have concerns. Many. Take Facebook: A study performed by German researchers earlier this year found users engage in ‘rampant envy’ on what the researchers called ‘an unprecedented platform for social comparison.’

Other studies blame Facebook for causing depression in those who see themselves on the sidelines of Disneyesque worlds portrayed in posts and pictures of people who are surely richer, happier and more beautiful. Ironically, many of these richer, happier and more beautiful types have reserved their own sideline views where the proverbial parade also passes them by.

Yes, I am a social networker. No, I don’t like it. I feel dehumanized and yes, I admit to twinges of envy now and again. It makes me tense and stressed.  It is a Mecca for braggarts, bullies, and scammers.

So why do I continue to use social networking? I do it because I teach business communication and social networking is ‘the’ place to be to connect with colleagues, customers and employees. I need to talk about and demonstrate it and its positive uses to improve business communications. Ironically, it does do that – improve business communication in many ways. In these classes, we talk about the ethics, integrity and positive uses of social networking. We also talk about productivity and business sense and the ludicrousness of having 1500 Facebook friends or over 100,000 Twitter followers.

There is a difference here, and that, I think, is that we have not put social networking in the personal pigeonhole into which it belongs. In business it is a place to visit, a tool to use and a means to an end. On the other hand, in personal realms, it has taken on a life of its own, a life that threatens to swallow many with falsehoods, fiction and fabrication.

The Natural Look

102_0717 (2)I’ve always been sort of a ‘natural look’ girl. I’ve never worn much makeup, love the comfort of sweats, and dirty jeans, and keep my hair cut short so I can wash, fluff and go. In fact, nature has always been very precious to me and intrinsic to my sanity.  As I age, this is even more so. Little by little I toss aside, give away, or sell on eBay ( my newly acquired hobby) all those clothes and items that cluttered closets, cupboards and coffee table.  As I remove layer after layer of ‘stuff’ I quite literally feel lighter of spirit and even of body!

In this same vein, this year I did the unthinkable. I gave away all my glitzy, shiny, bright and bold Christmas decorations to my 28-year-old daughter, albeit with the caveat that she hold them precious to her heart and hearth until it is time to someday pass on the gauntlet to one of her own. But my time with them was done.

I still have great spirit for the holidays, but not in the same way. Along with my new need to102_0720 (2) simplify my nest comes a passion to decorate it with the sights, sounds, and smells of the passing seasons. In spring it’s crocuses and cracked robins’ eggs, in summer it’s a tableau of rocks and potted herbs, in fall it’s a medley of late summer veggies. To celebrate the solstice and Christmas –my Boston Terrier Brinkley and I went hiking through snowy winter woods to find berries, dead and dramatic swamp grass, and plenty of pine from which I then crafted several arrangements. Martha Stewart I shall never be, but the joy of finding and making ‘real’ decorations from nature’s bounty far outweighs making the pages of Real Simple.