Shed Lights On Your Better Side I think Facebook is a cultural phenomenon of the sort that deserves some serious study. Serious, seriously.

I was just reading a story (something longer than a status update, something shorter than an essay) that one of my friends posted about nighttime animal invaders in her garage, a semi-entertaining bit where she talked about being confronted with the choice of snuffing out the life out of a raccoon. There were eight or so comments that got condensed so that I could only read the last two, and these last two were so out of context that I clicked on all of them to read what got people there. So this thread talks about chickens dying, some other miscellaneous nocturnal rodent adventures, and then around number five there's one stuck in there from her sister-in-law who talks about how her father, my friend's father-in-law, has been in a coma for two days and is going to die anytime and she'll call her when it happens.

So. My questions are many, but mainly: why did she write such a personal thing there? Why would a matter, literally, of life and death be inserted inbetween people laughing about raccoons? Why are so many people getting to be so comfortable talking about the most private and important things so casually in such an open forum?

Which is ironic I guess coming from someone writing a blog in a world where blogs exist to talk about private things. But this feels so different somehow. I don't know. Maybe it isn't.

Now in the interest of continuing the non-private tradition, my children are practically in college since the second to the last time I wrote. Click for bigger pic.


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  You Can Feel the Electricity All In the Evening Air It's true that I need an outlet. I just wrote on FB that every month I write the mother's club newsletter calendar section, and every month I write at least 10 snarky things and backspace over all of them. I want to see if anybody's really reading it (I know they aren't) but mostly what I want is to express myself. Like Madonna. It's hard not having an outlet, so hello again. I think about writing here about a hundred times a week and I never do it because I've built it up into this giant thing, like when you're fourteen and you're thinking about what your first kiss is going to be like and you watch the kissing scene in Some Kind of Wonderful a thousand times hoping it'll teach you how to do it so you'll be prepared. What? Maybe it's not like that at all. But so right now I'm just writing so I can feel my fingers do it so I know that they still work.

I'm tortured. I've got no follow-through. It's really eating at me, all the things I've got half-finished. A couple of people I know have dropped dead lately (they were old, but it still counts) and to paraphrase whatever it was I heard on Terri Gross on NPR today, the death curtain has been lifted. What separates me from it is not so separated anymore and it freaks me out, makes me realize I'm not doing anything. And yes, whatever, I'm raising two children, and there is a certain amount of satisfaction derived from that, but also... not enough.

The snarky thing that prompted all this ennui: researching a nursery school carnival, where the kids do crafts and play games, and they said don't worry! All the kids win! You'd think in Silicon Valley they'd know better, that it's not real, not everybody wins, that not even kids should be sold that line. You must work for it, son. And if you sit on your ass in the parking lot of grocery stores waiting for your children to wake up from naps, you sure as heck aren't going to wind up in the plus column.  ¶ 11:24 PM 0 Comments