It’s Just Stuff

I am not a hoarder – far from it.  Family and friends, matter of fact, have been known to stalk my dumpster. They know I am a free-flinger of things I no longer want or need, things they are shocked/stunned/delighted to find in my refuse.

That said there are some things that are harder to part with, even when they have outlived their usefulness, broken down, or found their way out of my line-up of currently-in-use stuff. An artist-friend reminded me of this last week, when she posted on Facebook that she had to replace her laptop and wondered whether she’s “weird because she’s sad to see it go.”

Got me to thinking about those inanimate objects we find ourselves looking at like they’re old friends. I know lots of folks whose cars have names, who talk to their computers (some in fluent four-letter,) whose favorite kitchen knife would be one of the first things saved from a fire, perhaps even before the family photo album.  Why is it that we develop such deep attachment to things?  Is it weird? I don’t think so.

It is not weird to have respect for tools that have served us long and well. When the time comes to trade them in, replace them, or just let them go, it is the memories of the things we’ve made with them, the conversations we’ve had with family on them, the wild rides with friends we’ve taken in them that stir those feelings of nostalgia and loss. It’s not the thing – it’s all the thing represents – and it makes us sad.

That is not weird, that is human.

Anyone who does not experience sadness, wistful remembrance of wonderful times past, has not fully experienced the wonderful things in life.  To have lost something or someone, to have to let go of a thing you love, is a sad and terrible thing. It is also a joyful and fortunate thing to have known the gift at all.

Next time you double-clutch over the waste bin – with your 4-pound cell phone, your cassette player, your size 6 jeans – remember, it’s okay to feel a little sad at the letting go.

Don’t let anyone tell you “It’s just stuff.”

Remember, though, neither is it a horcrux, so don’t be sad for long.

Just Between You and Me

What I am about to say is NOT a new idea. This is a quote from 1999.

You already have zero privacy. Get over it. - Scott G. McNealy CEO of Sun Microsystems Inc.

Many of my Facebook pals have recently sent a message asking me to do a keystroke-and-click dance to “keep their private posts private.”  I just laugh.  I do as they ask, but I know it is futile. Better to accept and understand that whatever is in the air is in the public air.

If you write it, speak it; or do it within range of another person, his camera, or microphone; it’s public.

How many people do you know whose cell phones are camera-less?  Right.

How many apps do you use that involve some component of the thing knowing your location?  Um-hmm.

Ever check out your neighborhood on (even the lowly) Mapquest’s aerial view?

See what I mean?

For any action or thought expressed outside our own imaginations, privacy is an illusion. Let’s just accept that and act accordingly. Who knows, it might make us behave better.

It’s the Real Thing

I am not a brand – I am a person.  Yes, there are some descriptors that are appropriate to me, but they are not me.  From day to day – sometimes, moment to moment – I can float, leap, or grind my gears amongst competing labels.  Everyone does. What describes us, does not always apply, and it surely does not define us.

Given this most natural tendency to be many different things, it’s odd to me that lots of Tweets and blog posts and e-mails and Pins, lately, have been offering to make my “social media presence” easier by developing and maintaining consistent content delivery.

What?

Really?

The internet is already an extraordinarily impersonal medium.  Now, the suggestions swirl that I should automate my Tweets, use a Virtual Assistant to post “my” Facebook status updates, get guest bloggers to write my posts – I don’t think so. No thanks.

For me, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and all the rest of the town square/local bar/congregation/campfire  social media sites are really just long-distance versions of town squares/local bars/congregations/campfires.

I am not a brand.  I am a person.  When I post something – brilliant or bullshit – it is me, not some programmed list of ready-to-post Pablum sent via ether alarm clock.  If folks follow, read, share, or friend/unfriend me, it is really me. As the internet displaces more and more face-to-face relationships, I hope many folks will remember we are not brands.  We are people whose moods and waistlines and fears and desires change.

I am not “consistent content” and, unless you are really a Brand with a capital B (Danielle LaPorte and Alyson Stanfield, for example,) I hope you will share enough of you to allow me to make that distinction.

Sure, under the law, corporations are people, but I am not moved to Friend one.  Let’s be friends.

Thanks for the Cognitive Dissonance, Facebook

Here’s a Facebook post that stopped me mid-surf:

another toxic friendship..gone..LOL..this is getting to be quite enjoyable.

First, I thought, okay, someone is cleaning their friend list and is having a good snarky giggle about it.  Then my brain slapped itself.

Toxic friendship is oxymoron.

When an interaction between two people can be described as “toxic,” it cannot be considered a friendship!  For Pete’s sake, anyone old enough to have voted in two presidential elections should know that.

Friendship is a mutual gift between people. While friendship is not without its ups and downs, it is always about finding yourself and your friend better off because of your relationship. If it brings you down, it is not a friendship. Don’t call it that. Tell yourself the truth. Don’t devalue your true friendships by granting false status to interactions/acquaintances who are, in one way or another, more trouble than they’re worth.

Friends are good for us.

Good for friends!

Dear Diary

Remember (way way back before the days of Facebook – Hell, before home computers,) when the closest anyone got to publishing their every thought was to keep a diary – a well-hidden, locked, protected-with-our-last-breath little leatherette-bound book?  I do.  I was confronted with six, yes six, of these wicked little reminders of my youthful shallowness and stupidity when my mother decided to clean out one of her spare bedroom closets this week. 

She may have wanted desperately to know the contents of my teen-aged mind, but I know my mother had not read them, even though she’d had ample opportunity. She could have never mentioned she’d found them; she could have had her way with them and I would never have known. My mother is NOT that kind of mother, though. She respected my privacy when I was fifteen, which is why I am a hundred percent open and honest with her to this day. 

What to do, what to do?  Should I burn them without even opening a page or should I revisit every high school crush, hurt feeling, insipid poem, raging sibling battle, and everything else I had so carefully memorialized all those years ago?  I knew I had to at least take a peek. I carried the volumes to my studio and opened the books. Inside, I discovered a person I can no longer remember being; someone whose goals and dreams are so foreign to me that I felt I was reading about someone else’s childhood.  Those words could not have come from me  .  .  .  but they had.

As embarrassed as I was to read those revelations, reveries, rants, and ridiculous notions, I felt relieved – relieved because I had grown up.  I had survived the ignorance and arrogance and insecurity of my youth and NOBODY had to know all those false starts and missteps that led me to who I am. 

I am planning a private celebratory burning of my diaries, erasing all physical evidence of my personal confessions of youthful irresponsibility and missed opportunity forever.  As I watch the flames consume my annotated foolishness, I will thank the Universe that Facebook did not exist in 1969 and hope today’s electronic diarists never have to regret not having kept some things to themselves – well-hidden and locked in fabulously flammable leatherette diaries.