NaBloPoMo Has Me Writing About Crushes. WTF!
The prompt for today has me thinking back to when I was, hmm, let me see… Revolver came out in what year? 1966. August 5th to be exact. So I was 9 years old. I’d listened to other Beatles albums and 45s at a fairly well off friend’s house.
I know I listened to Rubber Soul there in her family’s rec room that abutted the furnace room and would have been called a basement in anyone else’s home, except for the long bank of windows that gave an amazingly expansive view of a beautiful deep lake in Northeastern Indiana. It wasn’t a basement in the typical sense as if you took the stairwell to the north side of the room it took you down past an entrance to a racquet-ball court at the bottom just before you exited the house at the base of the hill out of which the house seemed to grow. It was really a house that was on the top of a very big hill on the shore of a lake with one side of the basement wall exposed.
I also listened to Leaving on a Jet Plane, and Ballad of the Green Beret with her there. I played there several times and attended slumber parties there. Her mom was really nice and told me that she had once been a concert pianist in Mexico City. These people were so out of my league socially and economically that it was only the small size of our public school that allowed me to ever cross paths with them. But I liked the girl and loved the music collection that had probably been put together by her older siblings. Back then having a well off friend to visit was the Baby Boomer version of having an mp3 player.
So that is where I became acquainted with the music of the Fab Four.
I knew of them much earlier. I remember being in the living room and looking up over the top of my toy box at the TV Nightly News and seeing them descend from a plane after landing in the United States. They were special. I could see it.
The first album I ever saved enough money to buy, and was allowed to purchase, was Revolver. How my mother would not let me buy a copy of Two Virgins is for another day. I spent so many afternoons alone in my room in the upstairs of an old farm-house daydreaming about the future while listening to this album play on a little old record player, it was NOT a stereo, as the needle scraped away against the vinyl.
So it had to be around this time that I had my first erotic dream although I didn’t know enough about anything to really have it be erotic. In the dream, I was at a lake, a different one from where my friend lived; It was green, calm, and there were beautiful trees with mossy, low hanging branches. There was a row-boat, an old-fashioned, wooden, row-boat. It was not big enough for the Fab Four and me, but we all climbed in any way, and floated about the lake as though we were in some Victorian painting. It was so pastoral, romantic, and polyamorous. There was nothing overtly sexual about the dream, unless you consider Freudian symbology to be sexual. But it shall we say switched on the romantic circuitry in my brain.
I never did make up my mind which Beatle-boy I liked best, but John was my favorite bad boy. George was my political crush. And Paul’s cuteness was well… dreamy.
Later on when I was much older, like in 6th or 7th grade, I developed a thing for Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere and the Raiders. And my first crush for a real boy, well, that is for another post, maybe. It’s complicated.
Transition Happens
Though I do not ride horses, I’m back in the saddle again. Sayings such as this just seem to be appropriate for Tucson dwellers. This time of year re-emphasizes my sense of place on the globe. I’m quite conscious of living in the South Western United States. As I raked the decadently well-watered grassy patch in our backyard yesterday, I wore shorts and a sleeveless top. Sunny and mild late fall here in Southern Arizona is strikingly different from the cold, snowy lead up to Christmas that was usual in my childhood in Northern Indiana.
My fall fog has lifted and though I’ve received disappointing news about the Holidays, my outlook is better than it has been in quite a few weeks. My s-daughter and son-in-law and their twin girls will not be coming to Arizona for Christmas. Living 2500 miles from grandchildren is difficult. My b-daughter cannot come from just this side of the great white north for Christmas because she is the most recent hire where she works and cannot take additional time off at Christmas. I’m hoping to see her in January for her birthday, but this is not a sure thing by any means.
As a Later Born Baby Boomer who is done nesting this year has been an extended rite of passage for me. It has been wonderful and horrible all at the same time. Moving my daughter to her first home across the country with her significant other after her college graduation was a fun adventure. And I reconnected with old friends that I decided to look up as I was passing through Chicago. That was wonderful. A quick trip through Northern Indiana, where I grew up, to visit family was not so fun. The declining health of my two remaining siblings, who are 9 and 18 years older than me was apparent. A 40 year old nephew of mine passed away. Our dogs who were like family were swarmed by Africanized bees. One survived.
Hubby and I began the next, not at all well planned, phase of our lives that included a road trip to his old family farm in Tennessee. That stop was followed by a horrible experience with old friends and a previous spouse’s current spouse who threatened me with violence and later became violent with Hubby while we were visiting Hubby’s old home town (not in TN.) That experience limited out ability to visit our grandchildren which was heart-breaking, and for me that sad shock it was also coupled with my finding out, when attempting to track down my brother who is closest in age to me, that he had been in a VA hospital for the last 6 months. A visit with my eldest brother who recognized me but was not really able to carry on a conversation capped off my understanding the family of my birth no longer existed.
Thank heavens our visit with our daughter in Minnesota was wonderful as was the trip to and from NY that I took by myself to attend a blogging conference when Hubby and I parted vacation ways in MN. He continued the last leg of road trip solo and I traveled by train to a blogging conference on the East Coast with a quick trip back through Indiana to follow up with my brother in the V.A. hospital.
A new puppy and a trip to “Mexican Riviera” filled the fall with activity that kept me from falling too far into the depression that decided to visit me this auturm after several years without it showing up rounded out a year filled with travel and learning. This has not been the year I had planned it to be. My book isn’t finished and my sites are not where I had planned for them to be.
There is a lesson to be learned in all of this. I just haven’t distilled it all down into a single bit of truth I can carry forward with me as yet unless it is: Transition happens.
Follow Friday: Networked, Tweeted & Pinned
WHAT IS #FF
Two weeks ago, I mentioned the need to use the #ff hashtag on Twitter more effectively. My experimental change to this end has begun.
#ff is a Friday meme on Twitter that is connoted by the #ff hashtag and is used as a way to promote Tweeters you follow and find interesting.
It might look like this this, that just happens to be the people I #ff-ed today, individually:
#ff @mimiavocado @amnichols @Cecilyk @ABattheBurrow
A tweeted list of names, @ signs with a person’s twitter handle after it, without context, does little to inspire other than the most devoted of Twitter followers to check out the list of your followers that you recommend. I have seen the hashtag #ff used as a reward given for new followers, as a shout out to buds met in the physical world may not have a large footprint in the social media world. So, I’m approaching this hash tag a bit differently from now on through the end of the year, at least, to see if it makes a difference for the people I recommend, to my interaction with them, to my overall stats, or if it just gives me a platform from which to examine Twitter activity, and Pinterest activity, from a more informed vantage.
It will take me a while to play catch up with all the folks I should have already #ff-ed. Within a couple of weeks I will be caught up, though. Well, on second thought, give me through the end of the year on that too. It all starts with Pinterest, but I will get to that in a minute.
TWITTER, PINTEREST & INFO THEORY
I’ve been thinking about this whole “social media thing” for years now. I decided long, long ago that I wasn’t as into quantity as quality. That’s the whole “It ain’t the meat, it’s the motion,” thing.
Figuring out what constitutes quality in the new world of Twitter and Pinterest is an anything but a concrete or well bounded endeavor. Life has never been simple, and that is infinitely more true now that we are but data bits churning within the swelling mass of everything that resides just before the event horizon of the Technological or Informational Singularity, put forward by Kurzweil. I’ve wanted to reference this fantastically titled article, The Information Singularity Arrives Next Tuesday, Around Lunchtime, for years. I’m sure it at first glance my mixing of the physics of the Cosmos with an explanation of why I think the link-up of Pinterest and Twitter is a good idea will baffle most of my college friends from Purdue who went off to work in Washington, Oregon, and what came to be known as Silicon Valley, in the late 1970s.
An informational change in kind is, and in fact probably already has, transmogrified all we know, and how we know it, and will continue doing so. My friends, “Welcome to the future fair.” As a comedy troop once said, “We’re all Bozos on this bus.”
This following You Tube video clip has nothing to do with Twitter or Pinterest. I recommend just listening to it sometime because… just because.
There is no way you can catch up. Just keep swimming, walking, writing, or thinking. Keep doing what you do. But knowledge, and the data connections that drive it, are so vast, and interacting and changing and creating new relationships at a such a near instantaneous pace (because that is what information does) that the very nature of information has
All of this is what has been bothering me about Twitter’s #ff. The information system has a life of its own. It may not be sentient yet, but it exists and is changing and adapting to what users think it is before anyone can figure out what it is. As amazing cultural and social media influencers, bloggy divas, and women of a certain age, my women friends and I drive the engines of the information economy who are incorporating women’s culture and knowledge into this new cosmic intellectual stew. My compadres and I are significant use innovators and the information we incorporate about women’s culture is essential to driving this new system to an equilibrium level that is more egalitarian, and more equitable, than anything that has previously existed.
PINNING MY #FFs
So, figuring out ways to efficiently maximize social media information and connections is something that we may or may not do “naturally” but it is something that we and new social media seem to be doing well. I love the linkages that develop between new systems. Tweeting my pins is something that seems like a no-brainer now that I am looking at both platforms. What I have decided to do is:
- Figure out which social media dudes and divas I want to feature on any given Friday
- Get the links to the most complete listing of those folks social presence – probably a blog
- Pin those links to my #ff board on Pinterest and choose the image you want associated with the blog among the options presented to you
- In the pinning process SKIP OVER adding the checkmark to the box that says, Twitter
- You will add the #ff before the text of your tweet on the next screen – and though I didn’t do it this week (duh! I forgot the at sign with twitterhandle) the text of the tweet should probably read something like “#ff, @twitterhandle, brief intriguing comment about the person, pinterest-generated url to the pin
Doing it this way, I think, has these advantages:
- highlights the individual
- links blogs with twitter handles
- crosses platforms and thus kills two birds with one stone… Hehehe twitter and birds, get it?
- is more permanent than a simple tweet that gets lost in the Dickensian world of the Tweets of Twitter Past
- allows the visual to accentuate text without detracting from either
So, what do you think? Is this a great idea or what?
What Does This Mean To You?
When almost anyone asks me what something means, I will answer with gusto. Meaning and how we create meaning is one of the major interests of my life. Semiotics is how things mean. Semantics is what things mean. The question, no matter what the “something” is, gives me a chance to ply my trade. I don’t get to do that as often as I would like.
My career and indeed my life has had many “interruptions.” Several minor surgeries in the late 90s brought back somatic memories and emotions that completely destroyed the tenuous self esteem and certitude of purpose I had managed to create for myself; In spite of surrounding myself with people who were similar to my family of origin in that they were not supportive to the extreme. I collapsed emotionally. I had to quit my job due to stress and depression so that I could use the energy I could still gather to raise my daughter. This hurt my family financially, my husband did not understand or deal well, at all, with my inability to cope with my despair.
As I once wrote in a poem, “the page will listen when my throat runs dry of scream.” So, I managed to begin writing on several topics dear to me, and this outlet allowed me enough reprieve from teetering on the abyss to do some things, the most important things for me, very well. I was a Girl Scout Leader, made amazing Halloween cakes, and was, I like to think, a fairly significant influencer in the early days of online communities. Eventually I became a peace activist between debilitating bouts of depression, When I was not in a severe depressive episode, migraines stole much of the little remaining time. I developed many physical problems. I knew I had to dig deeper and act as my own, and only, advocate.
I addressed the final piece of unresolved and unhealed emotional damage during this time and began writing about Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy child abuse that I finally understood as the underlying condition that hurt, festered, and scarred over without ever healing. Working for peace allowed me to develop strength and determination and use my writing and field skills in support of good, valuable work which others valued and expressed the value they placed on it to me. That gave me enough strength to persist with my healthcare providers until they figured out what physical problem was exacerbating the emotional struggles in which I was engaged. When I had corrective nose surgery so that I could breathe and sleep again, for the first time in decades, it allowed me to create a baseline that allowed me to buttress my own foundations and begin to build a real life of rewarding work for myself. This included finding a network of women bloggers within which I could practice the skills I had never learned or had not had the opportunity to practice.
Within the last couple of years I have noticed a trend of women close to my age, or in the same stage of life as me, regardless of age, beginning to build sub-networks within the larger blogging community. This year at the annual conference of this network of women bloggers, a critical mass of the subgroup began to, as I see it, build upon each others energies, and something amazing is coming from that collaboration.
There is something afoot. As a guerrilla anthropologist with a semiotic toolkit who read too much Alvin Toffler as a child, it seems I have been trend spotting for most of my life. Discerning patterns is what I do best and there hasn’t been a big demand for my rather esoteric skill set in the backwaters where I have lived much of my life. I have also lived in University towns where there is a glut of esoteric when I wasn’t located in the boondocks.
So while I have found my tribe in bloggy world of women of a certain age I have neither the professional work history or money behind me that most of them seem to have. I am so tired of trying to do everything by myself without a safety net or emotional support network, but I lack so much of the social skill it takes to take advantage of the opportunities that are developing as I write that I have a sick feeling I will miss out again.
I have to fight the desire to collapse, to just melt into a puddle of despair and have a little private pity party. I worked ever so diligently to create an awareness of the segmentation of the Baby Boom into several quite distinct cohorts. I was a social media influencer in this area over a decade ago. I was early in to the BlogHer sphere of political and techy bloggers. On my “it ain’t fair” days I feel as though I have helped others and not been acknowledged or reaped any rewards from these efforts. On my better days, I just say, “life isn’t fair and thank my lucky stars that I have a brilliant husband whose research will ultimately save untold people pain, suffering, and premature deaths, that we have a roof over our heads, food in our bellies, and kids and grandkids who are happy and healthy.
So when Chloe of The Chloe Chronicles asked a question about meaning on a closed blogging group on Facebook, it really made me think. I am absolutely certain that there is a nexus within the global information network that will exert a profound influence on and shape women’s information and history for generations to come. Women have always been keepers of family and community meaning. Local and family history and lore were oral traditions and documented in the letters of women that were saved for a few decades at best while institutionalized knowledge was most often limited to that from male spheres of influence.
No matter how troubled, unappreciated, stressed, overworked, or underpaid we women writers of a certain age may be, we are creating the structure of future with the paths we walk, the words we write, and the myths we disintegrate with our raging ray-guns powered by the energy released during hormonal fluctuations. I am still convinced that all the other women bloggers of a certain age are thinner, richer, better looking, more inspired, more talented, and better connected than I will every be, that is my problem. I am glad I am in their midst, because they help me understand that the meaning that is everywhere in their worlds is the same meaning that I find in mine. We are all so much more similar than different. That is meaningful.
Angelic Friends and Angled Paths
I wrote a poem after a phrase lept to mind upon reading Carrie Newcomer's email/newsletter info about her upcoming CD release. The phrase was, “angelic friends and angled paths.”
So this week, rather than reviewing an app today, I am encouraging you to check out Carrie's music. You will be glad you did.
thoughts of rhinoceri
angelic friends and angled paths
and reason on its way
intersect
intersperse
patterns in the fray
woven in the fabric of
forever, never, may
meeting through the men we soon
grew beyond and bounded by
kindred sisters of a sort
our paths were lit by allegory
separately we learned to fly
with words, voice, and heart
united by the fierce peace of soul
of moonlight on the wabash,
and moons in Stjukshon skies
all too familiar
with the sad hurt of humankind
there is faith in calm belief
in your wind whispered gospels
my earthy baptism of self by thorny creek
resilient friendships bent like willows
while other connections snapped like twigs
though our paths ramble, they curve mostly parallel
the laughter and love of long time friendship
chimes meditative recognition
sister voices of the kindred
crisp, tender, and real
by nancy hill
25 september 2012
inspired by Carrie's new album cover:
I'm just promo-ing this because I love Carrie, and her music is absolutely inspired. I highly recommend getting some of her music. I am receiving no compensation for promoting her music. Here's the info on the CD from the newsletter:
November 13, 2012 Rounder Records releases a new compilation of Carrie Newcomer music entitled Kindred Spirits: A collection. This generous collection of 19 songs draw from Carrie's catalog of 12 Rounder Records releases. It also includes two previously unreleased songs, two songs from her special hunger benefit project (Everything is Everywhere) featuring beloved Indian classical sarod masters Amjad Ali Khan, Ayaan and Amaan Ali Kahn … Also incuded are Carrie's haunting duet with Mary Chapin Carpenter, “Before and After” and the clear voiced celebration of “The Gathering of Spirits” featuring Alison Krauss. …
Tumbleweed Tails and Gelato – The Italian Connection
In the midst of having a list of writing and platform installation tasks as long as my arm, this past weekend, my Hubby, Fang, wanted to try to track down the person who ran the kennel where we purchased our last Italian, or Neapolitan, Mastiff. Since the untimely death of Mr. Worf, our last Neo, from an Africanized bee attack, Hubby Fang has been inconsolate. He is a boy who really needs to have a puppy. We ended up with Gelato instead of a puppy. I have to highly recommend Frost for some of the best gelato ever. Really! The master gelato maker is here from Italy with a special work visa used exclusively for highly skilled specialists. If you are in Tucson you need to check it out one of their locations for some excellent, one-of-a-kind flavors, and they always have two sugar free flavors that are the best you will find anywhere. Actually, they are opening up franchises for this Tucson-based business, so you might be able to find one close, or at least closer, to you.
We have to spend time creating our new married life for the next phase of our life together. We never had any real time as just a couple. We started our family immediately upon finally getting together. I knew Fang for 15 years as a dear friend before we ever got together. Once we finally got together there was no time to waste, apparently. So here we are 23 years later, after already having grown tired of each other's annoying habits and idiosyncrasies, as most long term couples do, trying to be nice to each other in our new dynamic, and not really knowing how. Remember, remember, remember… what was it, besides sex, that I found so irresistible about him so long ago? Well, he is brilliant. But then so am I. And he loves dogs. For me that says a huge amount about a person. Good sex, good brain, and dog-lover. What more does a woman need? I need something for Fang to do to keep him from starting any more construction projects around the home. Have I told you about the kitchen cabinets he has been building for five years? That, as they say, is another story. I'm in hot pursuit of finding him a new pup to be his best friend.
In fact this weekend, today, we drove up to Phoenix from Tucson to meet some rescued Neapolitan Mastiffs. We are seriously in the market for a companion for our grouchy 8 year old mixed breed bitch. So we met the most adorable rescue male Neo. His name is Cooper and he needs a forever home. He is a year or so old, but Neos act like puppies until they are two or so. He loved me and gave me kisses almost immediately. He got on fine with our Miss Daisy too; serious butt-sniffing ensued and there was a little bit of circle play. But he was sort of indifferent with Hubby Fang. And Fang is the boy who needs a puppy.
It broke my heart not to adopt Cooper because he has a sweet, truly non-aggressive personality, and is so friendly, happy, and playful. He isn't super wrinkly at all, as most non champion Neos aren't, and he is a bit on the small side, which I think is good because that could extend the shorter lifespan tht some of the really big dogs tend to have. I think he is perfect. I wish he would have hit it off with Fang. He has a cherry eye that will be corrected with surgery, at the same time he is neutered, before being released to his forever home. I hope someone special adopts him soon. He would be perfect for a woman in need of a companion dog, and he is good with kids so a single mom with kids would be a great fit. Did I mention he has the most gorgeous soft, shiny black fur? He has a short coat so shedding wouldn't be bad. Mastiffs are the most loyal canines ever and when they bond with their forever pack, they are the best friend you will ever have. Rescue animals need your love even more than regular animals.
I hope you will consider adopting a rescued animal the next time you are searching for a pet. They need us so much. There are probably a hundred or more animals in need of homes in your city right now. You can check out rescue animals in AZ and the Southwest by going to Canine Rescue Coalition on Facebook. Pet Finder is a national website that works with many local rescue groups to connect you with animals that need homes. Don't buy, adopt. That way you are not supporting puppy mills and setting up unpurchased animals for abuse or euthenasia.