Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me… “Well, you say it’s your birthday, well it’s my birthday, too, yeah…” “A very merry un-birthday to you… to you!”
I think I may give myself something material as well… like an iPhone on a Cricket plan, but while I’d love to take a walk in the Wildflower Woods of Gene Stratton-Porter’s northern Indiana, and reminisce along purple-infused, lilac-scented paths, what I am really giving myself is the gift of permission to redo everything I have that is online, again…
Do I do this every year? Well… yes I do. My favorite quote is àpropos here, it is one by Walt Whitman: “Do I contradict myself, very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.”
I’ve only teared up a couple of times today. Pretty good for me on a special day. I always get sad on such days. No reason to go into why… but I am learning, even at this advanced age, that I do not have to explain myself or my actions to anyone. This may be the biggest thing I have learned for a long, long time; it is right up there with how to filter out idiots, apart from idiotic things said by friends, as a separate items on my Facebook stream. (That dear friends is a post in and of itself! There are so many wonderful people I like to follow but even they post really stupid things!)
I think it was three years ago that I started to put everything on nfhill.com. Then two years ago I decided to create donenesting.com, then last year it was boomher.net… and somewhere along in there I decided reasoncreek.com had to exist. Perhaps you see a pattern?
So, at least for the moment, I am giving myself permission to mix it up again even though I’ve sworn a thousand times that I would not do it again. I’m keeping Reason Creek, this site, and will keep it live. I like my little imaginary spot under a tree by a stream where I can read while naked and converse with other reasonable people. (Sort of like working from home in your pajamas.) What else I will keep live is questionable. I started building a business site that I need to finish and update at Hill Research Services.
Those are the two places I will focus my online writing energies while I finish up the book that I have been working on for the last 10 years, started writing in earnest a couple of years ago, and started the (please Goddess!) penultimate draft a few weeks ago. No more sites. I have this little virtual hording problem that I will post about in the next month or so. My name is Nancy and I horde domain names. So that makes two more posts, Domain Hording and Facebook Idiocy, that I have just thought of while writing this post. Geesh, this writing thing is a vicious circle, cycle, or something, no?
I hear that there are people who are not constantly assaulted by ideas, but I am certainly not one of them. Anyway, this year I am giving myself permission to focus on my book, blog and business site. Damn all those other great ideas I’ve had like Late Boomers, Build Peace, BoomHer, Done Nesting, Things in the Attic, Triple Bottom Lines, Blogging Cooperative, Tucson Ghosts, Massage Therapy Tucson, Casita Gaia… they can just hang out in cyberspace, like the neglected orphans they are, until I figure out what to do with them. Unless you want to make me an offer! Seriously, there is the third blog post topic I’ve generated while writing this one – Domains for Sale!
So now I’m off to work on something else other than this post! What do you horde, virtually? Have you ever given yourself permission to do something for your birthday? What was it?
Conspiracy Theories & Cyber-Stalking
I’m getting absolutely nothing done today.
Back in the days of television and real paper and pens I seemed to get a lot more done.
It all started when I opened Facebook this a.m. and saw a Glenn Beck post that a childhood friend had liked. I try to be open-minded, but how could someone who seemed of above average intelligence as a child not only read and not question such an ignorant man, but not be ashamed to pass on the drivel? I followed the link and could not make heads or tails of the rant that I found. I honestly could not figure out what the topic was because there were no content statements that linked it to any news event or person or process or fact that I could find. The most factual info I could find was a reference to a Saudi situation. I had to exit the site and do about 10 minutes of research to figure out what the conspiracy theory Beck was ranting about even related to. I don’t get it. Why do people want to live their lives in fear and ignorance and believe the worst of people. I just don’t get it.
So then I went into my office and attempted to start working.
I did install the Genesis Framework and the Metro Theme on my blog site’s server, activated them, and activated a couple of plugins. For some people, that might be an achievement I suppose, but I always know when I’m actually in a funk and denying it; rather than writing, I start playing around with structure instead of content.
I did want to convert the site to a more secure setup, but I knew I was avoiding the cognitive dissonance that often accompanies trying to understand the contradictions that inform most people’s lives. Are these folks dumb or purposely ignorant?
Then one thing led to another and I started looking around for a picture of the farm I grew up on to use as a background for the site, and before I knew it I was deeply enmeshed in stalking my ex’s wife on Twitter.
I haven’t seen my old boyfriend that I lived with in my 20s since April of 1989. I last spoke with him on the phone in June of that same year. I married. He dropped all friends that knew me and hurt many people who cared about him by doing so. I knew he married eventually, had a kid, and lived within a few minutes of the rest of his family very close to where he grew up. I guess I just wanted to know what he looked like.
I found a Twitpic of him that his wife had shared a few weeks ago after perusing accounts of the nieces and nephews and other relatives who might have mentioned him. I eventually figured out what his wife’s twitter handle was and just like that I was looking at a recent pic of him.
My hubby and I got old and fat, but this guy looked severely thin to the point of wasting. Either he is ill or he never learned to cook for himself.
So what is the point of this? I’m not sure, but it sure is surprising what you can find out about someone even if they have no cyber-footprint by searching accounts of people who may know them. I saved the pic so I can show some folks who knew him way back when and usually ask about whether I have ever heard anything from him when I see them. I guess I feel a bit weird about having done that. I don’t usually do anything that would impinge on another’s privacy. But I spent 15 years with this guy and I wondered what happened to him. Was I wrong to do this? Does it count as stalking? Have you ever done anything like this? Do you think people have stalked you online?
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.