On Friend Requests

I'm a participant in a completely ridiculous number of social networking websites, fan forums, and various other places that *ahem* need my commentary. Obviously.

MySpace and Facebook are the tips of the iceberg. MySpace is where I geek out over fandom; Facebook I joined because my Swedish family all belongs, and thus I can much more easily keep tabs on them by being a member myself. Here's an unintended consequence of that; I have friend requests on both sites from people that a) I don't know b) I don't remember or c) I never liked. What to do about this? Thus far, I've simply ignored the requests, and that will remain my course of action for the foreseeable future.

It seems both odd and incongruous, to me, anyway, to request a friending by someone you were never friends with in the real world, or that you come across their name and say, "Dude. I oughta friend them." Maybe that's because I remember a world before teh interweb; maybe it is because I am more sane and normal than I think I am.

Online friends is one thing; I've got a passel of 'em from fandom that I've never met in real life, but we share a common ground. (Mainly a rabid fascination with a television show, but hey, we're normal. What? We are!) The people that I know in the world inside the computer obviously were strangers at one point, so my argument here is mostly self-defeating, but....

I'm not doing a great job of explaining the problem.

In clear, simple language, then, here it is. I have a friend request on one site from someone that I know attended the same high school as I did. We were not in the same graduating class. We never once, in the 10 years I attended that school system, had a class together. We weren't friends. That's harsh, but it is true. We aren't friends. I vaguely recognized the name, but know nothing else about this person, and truthfully, I don't care to. High school was two years of absolute hell for me, and mostly, I don't look back on my time in high school with fond memories. Times when we weren't actually IN the school building are another story, I have great memories of huge amounts of silly teen-aged things we did. Phrases that mean nothing to anyone else ("It was a six-foot chicken, officer!') reduce me to laughing so hard I'm gasping for breath. School itself, however, is an experience that you could not pay me to repeat. Ever. So why the living hell would I want to re-hash any of that with someone who went to the same school district, and that I was never friends with? Answer: I would rather not, if it is all the same to you, thanks.

One of the other odd friend requests is from someone who shares DH's last name, but when I showed him the profile and the picture, this wasn't someone he is related to, even in the very distant second-cousin-twice-removed kind of way. This person lives in a state roughly a thousand miles from my own, and we have no friends in common. Sorry, but I sure as hell ain't gonna click the "friend me" button when I don't know who in the world you are.

A third one is from someone that I exchanged e-mails with, two years ago, when I was running the non-profit. We're talking about maybe 4 e-mails. And then I never heard from them again. So we should be friends....why, exactly? I can't come up with anything.


All of this really makes me sound as if I'm quite the self-centered bitch. I can live with that label, if that's the appellation I'm stuck with for this attitude. But I really don't think I am. If these were friend requests from people that I was friends with once upon a time, awesome. If they're folks that I've lost touch with over the years and always wondered where they ended up, cool. Old pen pals? That would be really neat, I had one pen pal who was from Scotland and another from the Midlands in England. I'd love to hear from either of them. Someone that I run into at the store who I've known my whole life who mentions that they blog? Sweet! Random people who recognize my real name, or just like Lucy's profile picture? Not so much. That sorta weirds me out, quite truthfully.

My attitude about all of this changes 180 degrees when we're talking about bands, authors, or other celebrities who have chosen to put themselves on these sites and grant admirers access to their private lives. But that's a story for another day.

Clicking the buttons on any of the sites that say 'decline' seem unduly rude, and thus I've chosen the do-nothing course of action.

Women are socialized to "be nice." We're told, "Nice girls don't do that. Nice girls share. Nice girls blah, blah, blah, blah." When I first entered the professional workforce, at the ripe old age of.....um, I think I was 21 when I went to work for Ye Olde Evile Bank...I came across a book called Hardball for Women: Winning at the Game of Business. It completely changed the way I thought about acting in the workplace, and how to get noticed and get advanced in the business world. Unfortunately, you have to be 'one of the guys' to get along. I didn't say that I made up the rules, or that I liked them. I just understand that you need to follow them. The author, Pat Heim, talked about how no one tells the boys growing up to "be nice" nor does anyone tell the boys that they need to go along to get along.

So I wonder: if I was male, would I have clicked the "decline" button long since and forgotten about this?

Killcare

I've resisted blogging about my childhood in much detail, feeling that as I wish to remain anonymous, it is foolish to give away too many details that might help someone identify me. But the story I am about to tell has very little chance of adding to the information that the interweb has about me.

I had an idyllic childhood, free from abuse, neglect, poverty or horror. I like to say that I have a white picket fences background, with a stable, two-parent family. Both parents were there for my sibs and I in just about every sense of the word. They're pretty conservative, and growing up I felt they were way over-protective, but they're fantastic parents. On my MySpace page, where you can list your heroes, the first two people listed are my mother and father.

We traveled quite a bit over the eastern section of the US as I was growing up, and spent time every summer at a cottage in Michigan, on a small lake. Being there was (and still is, the last time I was there) amazing. For one, as kids, at the cottage we were allowed to get things at the grocery store that weren't allowed at home, "because we were on vacation."

For another, we were just about inaccessible by anyone while we were there. It wasn't unusual for my dad to get phone calls in the middle of the night at home, calling him in to work. He worked long and hard hours as I grew up, and that time at the cottage each summer was devoted to exclusively not being at work, so it was a wonderful novelty to have him around all day, every day.

The area where the cottage is located is pretty remote. There was a party-line telephone there until the mid-eighties. The grocery store was 20 miles away, give or take. The movie theater and mall were farther, perhaps 40 miles away. There was no television at the cottage. And since I've already talked about the TV watching policy at our house growing up, this wasn't a problem at all. There was a radio, used primarily to tune in to weather forecasts.

The cottage did not belong to my family. Another family allowed us to use it in return for doing chores around the property, things like opening the cottage for the summer, repair work that needed done around the house (replacing a rotted floor, for example), cutting the grass, things like that. Many summers we were either the first family there at the start of the summer season, or the last family there before the fall set in, opening it for the summer or closing the place down in preparation for winter weather.

The place was huge, with the capacity to sleep at least 20 people comfortably, and it was often used by the extended kin network of the family who owned it. We often went with another family, and had 10 people or more in the house. It had a rustic kitchen and a microscopic hot water heater, but it also had a washer and dryer, a vital necessity when you wear every bathing suit you own over three days.

My sisters and I were allowed an amazing amount of freedom at the cottage. An almost intoxicating amount of relaxation of the usual rules, combined with the ability to do almost anything we wanted...it was a heady mix. The lake is about three-fourths of a mile wide and about a mile and a half long, and there wasn't much of it that wasn't visible from the cottage's long metal dock. A pair of binoculars hung on a tree at the shoreline, and with them, you could easily spot any of the cottage's watercraft. I don't want to really get into the nuts and bolts of the water-centered activity that went on there each summer, so let's just say that there was a rowboat with a very small horsepower motor that my sisters and I made good use of, as well as a very small sailboat in which I learned to sail. No matter which boat we took, we were usually within 'hollering' distance of my mother.

If we opted to stay on the shore, we weren't allowed to stray much from 'our side' of the lake, but there was more than enough to explore on 'our side' of the lake, so it wasn't a temptation to wander far. A well-worn path extended over most of our side, from the public beach and boat launch area of the lake to a creek which was perhaps 6 houses down from the cottage.

The cottage was strictly a place for summer play; it wasn't insulated and had only a small heater, not a furnace. While there was a fireplace, it would be devilishly difficult to keep the pipes from freezing in the wintertime, so it was prepared at the end of each summer to survive the harsh Michigan winters by completing a long list of chores, which included draining the pipes of every ounce of water. But not all the houses on the lake were cottages; many of them were year-round residences for their owners. It was easy to spot the difference; most cottages didn't have a garage, or if they did, it was a detached affair, with the old fashioned bi-fold doors hanging at an angle, clearly disused. The summer cottages also had that forlorn look that vacant houses often have. They might be unoccupied the whole time we were there, or for just a few days. Many of the cottages were owned by large clans, and while we didn't know the entire clan personally, we often knew many of the members of a kin network from our summer visits.

The houses that had full-time, year-round occupation were more robust and better cared for. I did not have a special friend who lived 'up' there (this spot in MI being far north of my Ohio home) as both of my sisters did. Oddly enough, there was no one my exact age in any of the kin networks or full time residents. Now, in my 30s, an age difference of a year or two is immaterial. At 14, the 16-18 year old set was mostly too old for me to be running around with. I was always old for my age, but these kids were a much faster set than I was used to running with, and their blatant sexuality made me very uncomfortable. So I gravitated to the adults, spending time with people who lived there full time, talking about cooking and often their kids, who were my sister's friends.

I also took frequent walks on the path that ran from the beach to the creek, and there was a cottage along the path with a name over the door, a wooden sign over the door that faced the lake, that wouldn't have been out of place at a kid's summer camp. It looked a lot like the cottage in the Steve Martin movie, Cheaper by the Dozen 2. While it isn't all that odd to name a property here in the States, it is not as common as it is in say, England. This one said "Killcare", and I spent no small amount of time one summer trying both to get an invite to see the inside of the place (note that I never succeeded) and trying to figure out just what, exactly, Killcare meant and how it was pronounced.

Killcare was an enigma to me because we did not know a single person who used the place. And because it was often vacant when we were there. One of the full time residents at the lake was a woman who had grown up on the lake and through a series of lucky coincidences had purchased a home a few houses away from the one she grew up in. Her daughter was my baby sister's closest summertime friend. I remember her name, and can clearly picture her face, surrounded by a curtain of dark red hair, often pulled up into a bun, her apple cheeks, her sunny smile. I don't often use real names here, so we'll just call her Jane. She and her husband (whose name I do not remember and his details are lost to time, I don't remember at all what he looked like, but I do remember his Harley motorcycle, parked in their big attached garage) were involved in a massive rebuild of the house they lived in, gutting it and nearly tearing down the original structure. The work they were doing was amazing, adding a section that was like a log cabin, and I spent many happy hours looking with Jane at interior design catalogs and magazines, and listening to how they had done each step of the remodel. They did most of the work themselves. Growing up, Jane had spent a lot of time at Killcare, and when I found that out, I couldn't restrain myself from asking many questions about the place.

When she said the name to me for the first time, pronounced just as if it was two words, kill care, I said, "Is that the place with the name over the door?!? Three houses down from our place, close to the beach? You know them? What's that place like, have you ever been inside?"

All this was said rushed, with barely a breath in-between. Yes, she assured me, she knew the people. They were "summer folks" like my family. From someplace even further away than the day-long drive it took us to get to the cottage from Ohio, but I can't recall now where they were from. She had been good friends with one girl, and had spent summers growing up sleeping there more often than at home.

I interrupted the narrative of What-I-did-every-summer-growing-up to demand, "What does that MEAN, Killcare? I thought it was maybe the name of an Irish county, like County Claire, and I thought it was pronounced kil-kar-eee. Or that it was a last name, or a town, or something."

She gave me an odd look, as if I'd sprouted a third arm, or if she couldn't believe that such nonsense was coming out of the mouth of a reasonably intelligent, normally articulate, small adult-like person. And this behavior was indeed more kid-like than I usually displayed.

"Kill. Care. Kill your cares. Kill yer care. Killya'care, Killcare," she explained, running the words together slowly and then faster, showing me how the name had been derived. She went on to describe the inside of the place, and talk about how her childhood friend still came every summer and that she and her family would be arriving after my family and I had returned to Ohio. I was mostly no longer interested in nosily barging through the interior after that, but I spent a lot of time thinking about the place's name and what exactly Killcare meant to those who had chosen it.

It struck me as very odd because why would you want to stop caring about someone or some thing? And then when I asked about it again a few minutes later, Jane explained to me that it meant to kill your concerns, leave your worries behind, not to stop caring about someone or something. Oh.

At 14, I couldn't imagine needing to be reminded to let go, stop worrying. Anytime I was at the cottage, it was summer, I had no responsibilities beyond the cleaning chores assigned to me (we all shared all of the housekeeping while on vacation, being reminded by both parents that they were on vacation, too). I've been thinking about Killcare, the phrase, a lot again, wondering if it would, indeed, be possible to let go of all of the things that are weighing me down and leave me feeling fettered to a life that I'm not sure how it got where it is, nor am I sure that I'm happy with it and want it to continue in the same direction as it has been.

How did I end up here? The quest of my growing up years, to paraphrase a line I once heard Madonna use, was to "Get the hell outta Ohio." I have a memory book, an autograph book that I purchased while in Sweden as an exchange that I encouraged friends to write messages on the blank pages. I told them they had to write something, "deep and meaningful" and since almost everyone who wrote something in it was 17 at the time of the writing, most of it is filled with what are now howlers of most amusing variety. We were so young. What was then deep and meaningful is now trite or worse, hilarious instead of earnest. But I'm struck at the fact that more than one person wished me sincere good luck in escaping small town America. I wonder what any of them would say if they knew that the zealot of those times still lives not at all far from the hospital where she was born, or that any of the places she's lived since Sweden were all in and around the hometown that I so desperately wanted the hell out of.

I need to make some changes. I need to get moving. Change directions. I'm going to quote Dave Matthews band lyrics here, and I hope I can be forgiven for regressing to a teen kind of thing to do, but he does say it so much better than what I would come up with.

To change the world
start with one step
However small
first step is hardest of all
Once you get your gait
you'll be walking tall
You said you never did
cause you might die tryin
cause you might die tryin


Right now, I'm feeling like I just might die if I don't try to make some changes. The 'die tryin' lyric is sarcastic, that hey, man, if you don't get out there, what's the worst that could happen? You might die trying? Right.

So this is my 'first step', admiting that some changes need to be made, that something must be done. Perhaps that is letting go of some of my worries. Killcare. What a great idea.

Motherhood and the Darkside known as MySpace

Tuesday and it is brain-dumping day!

I opened a MySpace account the other day. And before you call me a fucktard, and tell me that someone my age and marital status has no business being on MySpace, you ought to know why I did it, because that provides so much more fodder for making fun of me.

It can be traced back to my fangirly-ness, and my admiration of Jensen Ackles. He shot a movie last summer that hasn't been released yet called Ten Inch Hero (which is still looking for a distributor, apparently) and the movie's production people have a MySpace page. They also have a blog here on Blogger. The film is about a sandwich shop, not someone who is ten inches long, gutterface. Yeah, yeah, I know you were thinking it, 'cause I was too.

Anyway, on the blog, they announced a contest for fans to try their hand at making some manipulations of photos of Jensen. The film has not actually released any pictures of Jensen's character, Priestly, who wears a Mohawk and is apparently pierced and tattooed within an inch of his life. So fans have been making their own, with hilarious results. And the filmmakers put the submissions from fans onto their MySpace page. But to see them? You have to have a MySpace account of your own.

I don't NEED a MySpace page. I have enough trouble keeping up with this blog, getting my book finished, and taking care of the crap over on LiveJournal that DH and I do for our little piece of suburban hell. I spend too much damn time on the computer as it is. Friends of mine from high school have MySpace pages, and I've been urged to do one before...but there was never any reason to.

Curiosity over which of the pictures the filmmakers thought were the best, however, got the better of me, so I set up an account of my own. First, let me say that I'm not in love with MySpace's interface. That's probably only because I'm not used to it, and as humans, we're all pretty resistant to change. I digress. Secondly, I have to tell you about the photos...and then I'll get to why this has me thinking about motherhood. And no, the motherhood thing and the fangirl thing are NOT related. (I hear sighs of relief out there...)

Some of the pics are fun, but I've truly gotten old when punk hairstyles don't do much for me anymore. Once upon a time, I was a punk chick, with a bit of purple hair (carefully hidden from my parents) and I greatly admired the day-glo and easter egg shades of hair. My friend V would buy Manic Panic, and I think that Ultra Violet was the shade of purple that I had, but I couldn't swear to it.

In true late 80s/early 90s style, I had a tail of hair that was longer than the rest of my really long hair. (I could sit on it, y'all, that's how long it was.) I went to visit V, and she had just dyed her whole head purple. She had some of the Manic Panic left over, so we decided it would be a fantastic idea to dye my tail purple. With my head hanging over her mother's laundry tub in the basement, we proceeded to try to dye just the tail purple. Laughing uproariously, getting the dye EVERYWHERE, we were having a grand old time. When we were done, not just the tail was purple, but the whole underside of my hair, from about the middle of my ears down. And the laundry tub, and the floor, and our hands, and our clothes were all purple too. When my hair was worn down, it didn't show. Pulled up in a pony, or piled high on my head, you could see it.

So I do have some experience with the punk hair thing, although I never had a 'hawk. I generally put some washable day-glo pink spray or temporary dye into my hair for Halloween, because I like it and can't get away with it in my workaday world. But these pics of Jensen all punked and gothed out don't thrill me. There are maybe two out of 12 or so that I think are cute...and then I just want to cut and wash his hair. Sigh. All I want for my next birthday is to be about 24 again. Because this getting older crap really isn't very much fun. Better than the alternative, but still. Thirty-two vs. 24? I'll take 24.

After looking at all the pictures of Jensen as Priestly, I decided that since I'd bothered to set up the MySpace account, I should pimp out my own page, and began messing around with the settings and my profile. For a brief while, I had a real picture of my real self out there, but I've since removed it. It was not photo-shopped, since I don't have that program, but I did mess with it in the photo manipulation software I do have, MGI Photovista. I think it was still very recognizable as me, though, and my paranoia got the better of me, so off it came.

And then in the profile settings, there are a bunch of things that have radio buttons to click...married...single...divorced...gay....straight...bi....and I clicked all the appropriate toggles....married....straight....smoke, no....drink, yes....and at the bottom was a section about children.

I spent a few minutes staring at the screen, lost as to what I should click. Here are the options.

I don't want kids
Someday
Undecided
Love kids, but not for me
Proud Parent
No Answer

I eventually clicked Love kids, but not for me. But that decision was only after much soul searching. I'm at an age where I am maybe running out of time to have a child of my own. I hear the ticking of the biological clock, loud and clear. Hear it, but I'm NOT LISTENING!

All through my 20s, I was steadfast in my resolve to not get preggers, and in the fact that I never wanted to have a child. And for the most part, I still feel that way. The idea of my body being pregnant really grosses me out. Which is NOT to say that I think pregnancy is gross or disgusting, I don't. As long as it isn't happening to me. If that makes any sense. Carrying a child is the most natural thing in the world for a woman's body, but I don't want MY body to do it. Never? I hear my mother and grandmother ask. You will miss out on so much joy, they say. And maybe that's true.

My cousins are all older than me, and we're a tight-knit bunch, so there were babies being born every time I turned around in the family all throughout the decade of my 20s. A few friends even had kids that young, and co-workers of mine had a few as well. I love babies. Friends call me "the baby hog" because I'll steal away a newborn at a party or other gathering and hold the baby for hours. But I don't want one of my own.

Which makes me feel very strange. Unfeminine. Somehow, I've gotten the memo that in order to be a complete, whole woman, I must be a mother. The roles of my career, wife, sister, daughter, friend, writer, baker, cook, reader, knitter and fangirl are not enough, and to be all that a woman ought, I should be a mother as well.

Isn't THAT a load of bullshit? Do you hear early feminists rolling over in their graves? 'Cause I sure do.

And is it any wonder at all that I'm completely out of my mind if these are the connections that my brain makes every day?