That's the world, and we all live there

Lately I worry that every personal email I send is going to be marked as spam. I just typed one to Mark with the subject line PUPPIES, containing nothing but a link. Then I added text: "Did you read this already?" Still pretty spammy. I am too lazy, usually, to type out chatter, and I'm so often just sending something funny or interesting that in the old Book-of-Faces days I would have "posted" on someone's "wall" or whatever. And in the even older days before that I would've cut out of the newspaper with scissors and mailed in an envelope.

I got a flu shot today, at the weird clinic where I also got two of my four Covid shots. It's an empty office building of some sort, re-purposed into a vaccine clinic. There are twisty, winding hallways marked with blue tape arrows so you can figure out how to escape at the end. It's full of huge empty rooms with one or two pieces of plastic-covered furniture:

A ghost is clearly sitting in the left-hand chair.

A white lady with dreadlocks gave me my shot, after saying some things I couldn't hear (she never got louder, even after I said, "I'm sorry, what?" a bunch of times, so I gave up and put a blank smile on my face). Then I think she offered me a Dum-dum from a cup that had only like four in it, which was next to a pile of unicorn stickers, and I smiled blankly and followed the blue arrows back to my car.

Harsh words and scattered syringes

(From a movie review I was just reading: "Rated R for harsh words and scattered syringes.")

Ugh, I've got to get off the social media. Getting embroiled in a long back-and-forth with anti-vaxxers on Facebook was not how I'd planned to spend 2020. In contrast, and confusingly, I also had a lovely interaction with a friend I only interact with on FB (i.e. if I quit FB I lose that connection, and it matters to me). I'm continuing my brutal cull of people and places that bring me down, muting and unfollowing ruthlessly. 

Clover isn't a fan of the new normal around here. It involves a baby gate at the bottom of the stairs and being carried around a lot. No frolicking in the back yard, no off leash play times. Business-only leash walks. NO FUN. Added to our heartbreak is the knowledge that these are some of her last months (or, maybe, weeks) with Gus.

NOT A FAN

I want to fly like an eagle

Ooh, I like the new retro design, Facebook! Nicely done!

Hey I keep imagining writing about how we've now officially lived in Maine for 20 years and forgetting to do it. Which means we've lived here approximately 20 years and a week. We moved to Maine in February and instantly fell ill with the flu, all four of us. I remember it was vacation week — we planned to have that week to settle in before Zoë started school, but we stayed sick well into the following week. I picture us lying on mattresses on the floor and kids vomiting into the popcorn bowl* when I think of that time. We had a dog! Poor Happy, I don't even remember how we accommodated her needs for those first weeks. I guess we had a fenced yard full of dog poop.

Twenty years. Time is weird, and it keeps on slippin slippin slippin into the future,** doesn't it?

Also, this makes both our refrigerator and stove approximately 20 years old.






*Popcorn bowl = vomit bowl, sorry if you've eaten popcorn at my house.

**You're welcome, that's today's earworm especially for my favorite Academy Award winner!

Impeach Facebook

As I contemplate quitting The Book of Faces and Twitter (I am definitely taking some time away from both this month), I've been making mental pro and con lists, trying to sort out what's positive and healthy, what's necessary or at least convenient, how I can use social media so it doesn't use me.

Some of the pertinent issues I'm facing with loosening my connection are getting news, learning about cool stuff, connecting with other people, expressing myself.

I still use an RSS reader almost every day, where I read blogs, basically (are they all blogs? Do we still call them blogs?). I still blog, with (obviously) great irregularity and half-heartedness. Does anyone besides my mom still read it? Do I care? (I'm not implying that I don't, just that I'm uncertain.)

My brother is thinking of doing a newsletter, which I would enthusiastically add to my list of newsletters, and would read with even more enthusiasm than I read the ones I already subscribe to! I add and subtract them as the whim takes me. I am not a paying subscriber to any of them (which often gets you extra issues/deals/info), at least not yet. Maybe I want to write a newsletter? Do I?


Newsletters I always love:

Laura Olin (Everything good. She describes it as lovely/meaningful things, and it is!)
The Collected AHP from Anne Helen Petersen

Newsletters I almost always love:

Leah Finnegan
Brainpickings
Carrie Frye's Black Cardigan
Austin Kleon
Strange Times ("...a day-by-day rereading of the weirdest articles printed in the 1921 New York Times. Starring gangsters, killers, bootleggers, madmen and jazz, it is a weekly reminder that the past was stranger than we think.")

Newsletters I sometimes love:

R. Eric Thomas's Here For It
Two Bossy Dames
Jamie Varon's Friday Letters
The Shatner Chatner (Oh how I want it to be the Toast, but alas, it is not.)

Absurdly between angels

Copyright Andrei Lacatusu

I repeatedly set aside a little time to write in this here blog and then proceed to have the weirdest sort of writer's block. Weird, because there is no writing required here, no need to write anything in particular or in any sort of way. It's purely for my own entertainment and memory. So silly to come up short, empty of words to say.

I blame the Social Media in part. Click on that photo above to see more of Social Decay, decrepit sign versions of social media names. There's something so satisfying about these! I am taking January off The Book of Faces, as I resolved to do (although in so doing, I missed a friend's fantastic dream that involved me, my favorite genre of dream! Thanks to my brother, I was able to read about it nearly in real time, phew).

Also, the amount of non-creative writing I do in a typical day has increased over the last year or two, and that may have something to do with it. That's actually one of the reasons I am attempting to keep this whole blog thing chugging along, so I don't lose my soul to marketing-speak. 


Recommended reading:

Regarding the Em-Dash
Punctuation matters.

Toward a Pathology of the Possessed
On schizophrenia.

Between Angels, by Stephen Dunn
"Between angels, on this earth
absurdly between angels, I
try to navigate..."


Through the window I'm watching the sky turn strangely yellow-gray, as ice coats the trees and wires. The snow will melt before it gets bitterly cold again, which is a strange state of affairs for January in Maine.

2018

Here I am, rabbit rabbiting a day late (and several dollars short, har har). It feels awkward for January first to fall on a Monday, with January 2/Tuesday acting as the first work day of the short new week of the new year. I continue to remember/forget what day of the week it is...

My resolutions, such as they are:

• Hiatus from Facebook and sugar, for the month of January. We'll see about the sugar one. It may be most sugar, rather than all sugar.
• More writing, reading, and music listening.
• Unsubscribe from emails I always delete, however much I agree with their politics, etc. I am also going to unsubscribe from Twitterers and Facebookers (in February, to be clear) who make me unhappy.
• Slow down in most things, even walking in the cold and cleaning things. 
• Make things, especially for other people. 

the social network

founder of facebook
as lonely misogynist.
(and young billionaire.)

pastiche

i've already mentioned this on the twitter and the book of faces, but i had such a fabulous dream last night that i just have to describe it again. in the dream, i came across a great blog called dismal pastiche.* i then proceeded to email a link to myself via my brain. it was like there was a built-in iphone. in my brain.**


*yes, dismalpastiche.com is available. and it's MINE!

**just to be a little more meta about it, i then woke up, grabbed my iphone from beside the bed, and emailed myself a description of this dream.

streamline your humiliation

i find this article - about a guy who said something dumb on twitter and cost himself a job - quite amusing. i should be more sympathetic, since who among us hasn't said something stupid and humiliating that we wished we could snatch back just as it escaped our lips?

Why waste valuable social networking hours getting yourself "Facebook fired," when Twitter allows you to humiliate yourself quickly, and in 140 characters or less?

honestly, i am having very mixed feelings about twitter lately. i think it might turn out to be silly. facebook, on the other hand, gives me the opportunity to 1) play scrabble a lot 2) make plans with local friends 3) re-connect with high school and college friends 4) see what two of my cousins are up to 5) stay in touch with bean's friends, 6) watch funny videos, 7) etc.

from the aforementioned article, a bit of wisdom:

Never post anything you wouldn’t say to your mom, boss and significant other.

i have always stuck to that, as it's an intrinsic part of my very own personal lady blogger code of ethics (the other part is "always ask people, especially your own children, if they're cool with you posting their photos").