Monday, November 30, 2009

WTF!!??

This is something I picked up on Salon.com. I'm interested
in what folks think. I think how I feel is pretty obvious.

Editor:
Updated: TodayTopic:
Facebook Sunday, Nov 29, 2009 18:01 PST
Facebook, the mean girls and me
At 34 years old, I finally feel like a popular seventh-grader. How sad is that?
By Taffy Brodesser-Akner

I sit at my computer and wait for Barbara, who once poured yogurt on my head in front of the entire field hockey team, to tell me the details of her breakup with her current boyfriend. While I wait, I chat with Alison, who, years ago, stole my pants during gym and cut a hole in the crotch area, and who needs advice on how to sleep-train her baby. Still, while all this is going on, I play online Scrabble with Rachel, who, when I was 12, told everyone I had faked getting my period for attention.

I am someone with a life. I have a career, a son, a husband, an active volunteer life, and many current and real-life friendships that need maintenance. I have a work deadline in three hours, plus dinner isn’t ready. The laundry remains unlaundered. Why, then, am I sitting at my computer, concerned to distraction over the activities of the people who were cruelest to me during my formative years?

They weren’t always horrible to me. I loved fifth and sixth grades. I had a clique of friends, complete with secret nicknames, passed notes, knowing looks, friendship bracelets, friendship pens, friendship songs. We moved through the school as a group and took turns slumber-partying at each other’s houses.

We traded the title "best friend" regularly among different pairings in our group. Nancy and Barbara had spent two weeks together in Nantucket over the summer, and though Nancy and I had been best friends prior to that, apparently they had decided that their time had come to be best friends. They made this announcement to me via conference call the week before school started. I took it OK; after all, I’d been meaning to get to know Amy better.

Late in sixth grade, something changed, and I wasn’t a part of it. One day, all my friends came in with matching training bras. “I didn’t know we were getting bras,” I said. They looked at each other, a shared glance I used to be on the comfy side of, and my heart sank with the unspoken answer: We weren’t. They were.

Seventh grade began, and I found out we had grown out of things like changing best friends. I met a girl named Emily who had transferred to our school. After a good day of getting to know her, I asked if she wanted to be best friends. “You’re such a loser,” she spat. I looked around one day, and my group of friends had wandered away. Adults like to generalize and say things like, “Aren’t kids cruel?” But we kids, the ones who are left out in the cold, have a role in what happens to us. Not necessarily a fair one, but the facts of our unpopularity are not mysterious. We get fat, we say the wrong thing, we wear outdated clothing. Me, I was too needy. Long after my friends stopped needing superlative titles to know how much they meant to each other, I still did.

I did not go quietly into that lonely and unpopular night. Each morning, I tried to assume a casual air of friendship. Big mistake. My efforts backfired, and my former friends’ apathy toward me turned to hatred. Soon, I was not just ignored at school. I was tripped as I came out of the shower. People made flatulent noises when I sat down in class. My locker was magic-markered with the word "loser." We are tempted to remember this behavior and make light of it. Oh, it couldn’t have been that bad, we said. But I remember it well. It was that bad.

Now, all these years later, there’s Facebook, allowing us to put the past to rest, to erase the mystery that used to be inherent in the subject of wondering whatever happened to those people you once knew.

After accumulating college friends and ex-boyfriends, as we all do when we join Facebook, I took a chance and looked up Barbara. With the nervousness that accompanied me on every bus trip to school following my fall from grace, I pressed the button that would send her a friend request. Immediately, I received confirmation: She had agreed, finally, to be my friend. Brave now, I found Alison, then Amy, then Nancy. I was euphoric. Here I am, back in the inner sanctum. I sort through their pictures, their posts, their lives. I cheer their triumphs, their babies’ birthdays, photos from their ski trips. I cobble together the story of how life has been since we knew each other, deliberately, forcefully forgetting how it was we parted.

I check their updates and their statuses with eagerness each day. Like an addict, I am euphoric when I am practicing my addiction, remorseful and self-hating when I’m not. I am shocked at how easily I have forgiven these people. I am filled with the warm light of acceptance; I am wrapped in the cozy blanket of belonging.

In my imagination, my old clique’s renewed friendship tells me that they know they were wrong, that they were just being cruel. They’re sorry, they say with every LOL or emoticon. We were wrong, they say when they press the "like" button on my status update. If I’m honest, I bet they don’t think about it. I bet they regard me as a name that is familiar -- a new person in their lives, more than an old one.

There is no way to go back in time and undo things -- not the insults, not the humiliations. We can pretend some events never happened, though we are always still a little plagued. But, sometimes, we can also find a way to make what happened in the past right. I’m not saying you can do that with everything that haunts your past. But some things, you can. Maybe the way women in the '90s took back the word "bitch," calling themselves and each other by the ugly slur so that it wouldn’t hold power when men said it, maybe that’s what I’m doing with my former friends.

Why do you need to be loved by people who rejected you a hundred years ago, asks my husband, though I have explained it. He believes I have Stockholm syndrome, that I have fallen in love with my torturers. I tell him that these are just old friends, that I’m over it, that it’s nice to be in touch with a piece of my past. But I’m not exactly over it, am I? What I am, though, is someone who has finally found a way to put my life’s ugliest social chapter to rest. Maybe I didn’t come by it the honest way -- through a true reckoning with my past, a fearless inventory of what happened that year and why I can't get over it. But who is to say that we shouldn’t try to find peace any way we can? Who says it always has to be so hard?

Whatever my intention was when I contacted my former friends, it’s different now. I no longer want validation; I no longer am testing the waters to see if they now find me worth their time. These women are not who I thought they’d be. They’re people having a hard time in the economy, people who are struggling through their days, their relationships. I don’t have enough in common with them to think that, had we not fallen out, our friendships would have survived. But here, now, I am someone who also struggles with these things. I have stretched across a social divide that was narrower than I thought, and I found community where I least expected it. Am I pathetic? Maybe. But what I also am, finally, is a popular seventh-grader. I think of my younger self, eating her lunch alone, wondering when this agony will be over. I wish I could tell her I haven't forgotten about her. I wish I could tell her I've made it OK.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

What if...



What if a person could gain intimate knowledge of his neighbor by the simple act of sniffing his arse. I know it sounds kind of odd, but we have become a nation that is so completely obsessed with decorum in the midst of utter chaos, that it would be interesting to see how we would react if we could suddenly bring peace to the world by simply mimicking cats and dogs. And since I have never seen a poodle drop a bomb on a pit bull, I would say that they must be doing something right. I know it sounds crazy but what if sometime in 1000A.D. some king decreed that arse sniffing was uncivilized and that those who were caught doing it would be burned at the stake. I think that would be enough to make me walk upright. And maybe this king made this decree because he knew that performing this act would be the alternative to war and atrocities which would bare him more profit than peace on earth and decided that he and his knights would be the only ones worthy of the infinite wisdom that arse sniffing yielded. Therefore, it is possible that every high official in government who went to an ivy league school was in an arse sniffing fraternity and if they were ever caught sharing their arse sniffing secrets would be assassinated. Who knows? Maybe Kennedy was an arse sniffer who decided to blow the whistle on the whole arse sniffing conspiracy and was silenced in Dallas on that fateful day.

Just think if arse sniffing was legal, women would be sayin' shit like: I'm sorry, I don't arse sniff on the first date. And men would be sayin' "but I bought you dinner at an expensive restaurant, I think that deserves at least one arse sniffing"!? When applying for jobs, employers would not only require references and a credit check but a healthy sniff as well. (of course any use of tongue would be considered sexual harassment). On prom night fathers could put away their shot guns and sniff their daughter's dates instead. But would they? Absolutely not!

It seems that most of the masses are quite content with their mediocrity. Everybody says that they want infinite peace and wisdom but they'd rather not have to sniff arse to get it. What is confusing about this realization is now I don't know whether or not to be proud of the masses because of it.

Friday, November 13, 2009

The Word

Yesterday A student asked me why he had to learn English "if that's what we speak". It took me a day to articulate it but I came to the realization that speaking and writing is how we not only survive but evolve as a species. And since we speak English it is essential that we speak and write it well. If we cannot successfully express ourselves than we are subject to insanity. Nations live and die by the word. If we were never given the chance to hear King, Kennedy or Obama speak, they would only be mere men instead of the icons they have become. There are some who say that actions speak louder than words but people are called to action by the words of passionate and articulate men and women alike. Even if the words are "boy you ain't ever gonna amount to nothin" there are those who will be motivated to prove otherwise. Positive words just make such motivations easier to realize.

This goes out to all of the hard working people out there who sometimes can't find the words to express the fear, frustration and uncertainty that you feel in these challenging times. I personally have faith that you will find them. And when you do, make sure they are motivated by hope and love.

Here's to you and here's to "the word".

Thursday, November 12, 2009

'nuthin tragic...just news

If there is an art to being a grown up, I still have yet to master it. About 4 months ago when Devasha and I were finally closing on our new home it seemed as if our moment of Zen was approaching, but then the bills came and the promise of future bills followed. It was as if the issues that come with adulthood tapped us on our shoulders and with a wink and a smile informed us that the fun was just beginning. The good news is that nothing tragic has happened (knock on wood). Now don’t get me wrong. I am in no way wishing for tragic events to unfold. I am only acknowledging the fact that with the issues that come with home ownership one must always be mindful that stress is what comes with trying to make house a home. Anguish is what comes when that mission fails. There is something surreal about getting an astronomical bill for something that you have never had to pay for like water. The good news is that I now have a greater appreciation for water. My friend Sol put it best: “This stuff is just news…if it ain’t tragic news, it’s just news” even if it means I have to pay a high ass water bill, it’s just news; even if it means that because of said water bill I can’t buy the treadmill and the new snowboard equipment I wanted, it’s just news. . He also reminded me that sometimes even the most beautiful news can come with its own brand of stress. Hint: It’s the kind of news that can make a person both excited and terrified at the same time and takes 9 months to arrive (ok I will now pause for applause). Lucky for me all I have to do is to be stressed. The other stuff is all on Devasha (bless her heart). Maybe she can write her own blog on that subject. I’m sure she would do a much better job than I could ever hope to.

The last time I embarked on this journey to fatherhood my stress was from a more selfish place. I wondered how I could handle all of the challenges of being a father and still maintain a sense of self. My daughter Autumn came on the scene when I was sure I was on the road to being a rock star. I was hell bent on making every moment an adventure whether it was traveling, meeting new people or taking more personal journeys internally with the help of a cookie or two. I have since learned that being a dad is a quest unlike any I have ever experienced. Every moment I live now no matter how mundane is a fight against mediocrity. The demons, goblins and fire breathing dragons that I battle now are fiercest when I am most fatigued. Only a dad can know how tough it is to help a child with her homework after a long day’s work when all he wants to do is crack open a cold one and watch T.V. In fact, I’m STILL working on that one! Lucky for me we have a DVR. Now if I could just keep the cable on everything will be golden. And if not, it’s just news.