This social media thing is driving me nuts. I have never been a public-type person. I have never been extroverted (unless I am among a very small group of people I feel comfortable with). Yet I desire to interact with people on some levels.
But I don't desire to interact with people inadvertently. For example, I don't want the people who have chosen to be estranged from me to still have access to my life. I am actually horrified that friends of friends can see all kinds of stuff about me on Facebook - which means that if my relatives are friends with my estranged ex-relatives, the estranged ex-relatives can see stuff that I post or stuff about me. Now that is just wrong.
I also hate that people in my life only interact with me via Facebook. No phone calls, no text messages, no email (unless it's Facebook messaging email). I wish I could tell you that when I am contacted via Facebook it is almost always because someone needs something from me. That's a common theme in my life and is one that I will explore here in depth at a later date. But for now I will leave it at how much it sucks to be thought of as everyone's go-to person for favors and cash.
Did you ever think of how really weird Facebook is? I have this rule about Facebook where I only post stuff that will make people laugh or stuff that I would actually call someone on the phone to talk about.
I have a friend whose posts are almost exclusively about cats. I really like this person. She's cool, she's funny, but there's the cat thing. If she called me ten times a day to let me know what Whiskers is up to I would change my phone number. Then there's the Sally Sunshine friend. I'm pretty sure that nothing ever goes wrong in her charmed life and if it does she turns it into an opportunity to tell all of us in grand platitudinal fashion how the glass is always half full. Every single time. She has a zillion friends who 'like' every single thing she does and literally gush and fawn all over her in some weird Dear Leader or rock star/groupie way. If she does not buy a compound and create her own version of KoolAid she will be missing a fantastic opportunity. My house badly needs to be cleaned, the dogs need baths and I have a sinus/ear infection thing going on right now and if she called me with her incessant upbeatness I would hang up on her. I need people who complain in earnest from time to time. ;-)
By the way, anyone who has hundreds or thousands of Facebook friends does not actually have that many friends. What they do have is an audience. Really big difference there.
My problem with these people and their ilk is that they are too one-dimensional and if there's anything that drives me to the kind of boredom that makes me drink, it's one-dimensional people. I want to scratch their
Probably I just need to go to a coffee shop and strike up real conversations with strangers. I am not doing very well with people I actually know.
I went to see the author Anne Lamott recently. At the end of her talks she does a Q&A thing where people in the audience can walk up to microphone and ask her stuff or tell her how wonderful she is. This woman comes up to the mike, introduces herself, says she has two little kids, one of which is under a year old. She tells us and Anne Lamott that she is whacked out stressed, which is a theme that AL often writes about. Then she says a few months back she discovered her husband had been having an affair. Yikes, right? But she said she decided to work hard to forgive him and move on together with him, which sounds good and she's cute and charming and brave for telling her story in front of a thousand people and right away you hope he's learned his lesson and they can heal and be a family again.
Except she then says that they just found out that he has brain cancer.
Right then I'm pretty sure that someone in the very large audience dropped a pin and we all heard it.
Wait, what? WHAT? You want to talk about real life? That's it right there. There wasn't a person in that place who didn't want to rush up to her and wrap her up in our arms and then drive home with her so we could watch her kids and just let her at least get a decent night's sleep. We all would have given her twenty bucks if she had asked for it. In that instance we were one big room of community. I hope the woman knew that, I hope she felt it.
Community. I've seen genuine community only a couple of times in my life which really makes me sad because there are tons of opportunity for it every day. Anne Lamott talks about it often and refers to her church when she does. She has that; a little church where people know and love each other and they probably lend each other twenty bucks all the time but it's okay because....well, because they know and love each other.
Like, for real.
