Latest happenings and thoughts
I know I’ve alluded to it before, but lately I’m seriously wondering if I’ve reached my tipping point w/ social media. It’s true that I’ve been really busy in the past week, but come on, everybody’s busy, that’s not much of an explanation. Like I mentioned in a podcast a while back (would link but our site is down at the moment), I wonder if it’s finally gotten to the point where there’s just too much to keep up with. I haven’t been spending as much time on Twitter, and certainly not attempting to read everybody’s tweets. I haven’t checked Bloglines in days and have given up trying to read all my feeds – and I don’t even subscribe to an insane number of feeds, and certainly not the kind of blogs that post 20+ times a day! Then I end up reblogging shit on Tumblr and half the time I don’t know why, other than it’s a convenient way to help me wake up in the morning or unwind at night without using too many brain cells. I’ve been meaning to write Jenny and Niki an email for weeks now – and of course trying to find time to blog. It all seems so ridiculous, but more and more everything for me seems to be moving to quick little updates of 140 characters or less, no time to sit and write anything of substantial length.
I’d like to refocus my attention on my blog, even if that’s not where the larger “conversation” is happening. There’s too much potential for distraction and fragmenting of thought on the internet, and my blog has always been for me – I have to remember that. I’ve been doing a pretty good job of keeping up with my clothes-hanger journal, so there’s that at least. And for as much as I sometimes spout the social media buzzwords and prattle on about blogs, Twitter, etc. being a two-way conversation, when it gets to the point of making me feel so pressured, I know it’s not a good thing for me anymore, and it’s time to refocus – yes, on me.
So, I don’t know if people are going to keep reading here and engaging in a “conversation,” or if they’d prefer this all be presented as tagged Facebook notes and status updates – but I’ve been doing this for seven years and it’s been good to me, so I’m going to just keep on doing my thing. I enjoy participating in conversations but lately it seems like there’s just too much, and I can’t keep up. I know one thing for sure: I definitely never want keeping up with online conversations to get in the way of me living my offline life.
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My mom’s birthday was the weekend before last. She went to my grandmother’s house out of a sense of obligation and now 59 years of ridiculous dysfunction. Not just a river in Egypt, etc. It ended badly, in that predictable/unpredictable way – although at least this time, Gran didn’t threaten to cut Mom out of her will. A discussion about a chest of drawers (seriously) went from 0 to batshit in under 60 seconds, and Mom stormed out. And yet when I talked to her that night, she said, “It ended up being a really nice day.” After leaving Gran’s she sat in a parking lot, fuming, and called Crystal. They met at Hooters after calling ahead so the bartender could clear people out of my dad’s spot if necessary. There, the bartender announced, “We have a very special lady here today,” the whole restaurant sang Happy Birthday, the wait staff paid for her food, the manager gave her free dessert, and a table of GIs tried to buy her a drink. Also some people she’d never met but were friends w/ my dad came up and introduced themselves and told her how much they’d liked my dad.
There’s a lesson in there about the family you’re born into vs. the family you choose.
And even though the family I choose isn’t the family I was born into, well, I at least have a good enough relationship w/ my mom that I can appreciate how it works in her life.
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So yeah about that buying a house thing? We close on Thursday – yes, two days from now! I can hardly believe it. For a while I was nervous that the money I transferred from savings to checking wouldn’t get there in time, but tonight while we were watching old Daily Shows on Tivo, Rusty was fiddling with his iPhone and then he showed me the screen and it was our bank account showing the big hefty number. He said, “If you were wondering why I was on my iPhone while we were watching TV together, it’s because I thought you’d be happy to see this.” As of Thursday late morning/early afternoon? I’m going to be a homeowner, holy crap, seriously y’all, can you believe it.
I plan to take plenty of cheesy pictures at the closing, such as one of the seller handing the key to Rusty and me. I’m thinking of actually printing these photos out and making a for-real photo album or scrapbook. Say it ain’t so!
-But I better stop that train of thought because otherwise I’ll get going on my usual worrying about how we’re preserving (or not) the records of our lives for future generations.
Friday night while Rusty is at a Hawks game I’m going to put a coat of primer on the walls in our soon-to-be bedroom. Then on Saturday we’re going to paint the bedroom and maybe the guest room/pole studio/my office if there’s time. Then Sunday I’m off to DC to rendezvous and scheme with Ren, back on Tuesday, and while I’m on the plane Rusty will be waiting for the AT&T person to come and get the phone line and DSL set up. Then, more painting most evenings of next week – and yes, Rusty is going to paint the kitchen Tennessee orange.
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Dacia created a poll asking whether this year’s Sex 2.0 should have a keynote speaker. It’s open through January 31; vote here. I’m going to save all my Sex 2.0-related thoughts for a different post.
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Charles wrote a good post recently about an aspect of the decline of newspapers that I haven’t seen anyone else address: the way newspapers keep people in touch w/ their communities through obituaries, birth announcements, wedding announcements, etc. I can’t tell you how many people found out about my dad’s death because they saw the obituary in the paper. I just don’t believe the same thing would happen in an all-online model.
Rusty and I had a debate about this at Radial a few days ago. I would like to all write my thoughts about it eloquently, but for now I’ll just say that I don’t think print media is going to “die,” regardless of how loudly and enthusiastically some of the new media Kool-Aid drinkers are sounding its death knell. Is it true that print media is declining? Well, yes, duh. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to simply observe what’s going on. But as for what will happen in the wake of all this, well, I think that’s where I part ways with a lot of new media folk. Maybe it’s because I come from an activist [liberal Commie bleeding-heart] perspective, but I feel strongly that any action w/ large-scale effects should serve the people, not vice versa.
I think it’s not so much print media that’s declining, but corporate conglomerate print media. Are small papers getting bought out by those conglomerates? Yes, but they’re ultimately not surviving. I think in the coming years we will see more community-driven papers – you might even call them “hyperlocal!” – developing because it makes sense for their community. We all know newspapers survive largely on advertising – well, businesses within the community will advertise in the community paper because that’s how they’re going to reach their customers. They know their audience – we always talk about the importance of that, right? Well it applies just as much when we’re talking about non-internet-based stuff. I just get annoyed because sometimes it seems like people in my generation, of a certain class and inclination, get very zealous about this new media stuff – and I believe I’ve been guilty of it in the past, too. But it’s not the One True Way – there are myriad ways, each of which makes sense for a particular community. It’s like I was saying about ATACC getting press coverage and people assuming that other communities haven’t been organizing; just because it doesn’t happen online doesn’t mean it’s
Possibly related to this train of thought:
- The Printed Blog – people like to read the printed page!
- New Yorker article, The Day the Newspaper Died (I’ve only skimmed this; need to read it more closely later)
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I’m not going to say much about the ATACC group but I will say this. I left the Facebook group. The trepidation I felt from early on had only continued to grow as the days went by and more people signed up. Wall posts and comments with thinly-veiled racism and classism had gone into a full-on Dance of the Seven Veils by the time I checked back on Sunday, and it was all hanging out. Steve Gower was a member of the group FFS. This is exactly what I had been afraid of (and I had mentioned Gower and his midtown cronies specifically on Karsh’s blog). A particularly charming comment I mentioned on Twitter sealed the deal.
I don’t like the feeling I get from this group, even though I know many of the individuals involved and know their intentions are good. But there’s something scary to me about the group itself, something that feels menacing and threatening and… neither of those are the right word, exactly. It’s a feeling I have trouble putting into words. But when fear, unacknowledged privilege, and a lack of willingness to address deep systemic issues combine, the result is a nasty brew. Not sure how to write about this and get my point across… hell, somebody on Karsh’s blog already said my comment was “drivel” and referred to my “little mind.” I should know by now, though, that no matter what I say, there will always be those kinds of comments in response.
I know I’m about to move to East Atlanta and be a homeowner there and I just wonder what I’m getting myself into. Rusty and I said we wouldn’t want to buy a place in midtown because of the people – and we didn’t mean the street sex workers. I’m sure our new neighborhood will be filled with nice people but what worries me is that often you can’t tell, from pleasant everyday interactions, who’s going out at night in a truck with a video camera.
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I’ve covered about half the things on my “stuff to blog” list at this point, and I need to get to bed. Teasers of things still to come:
- The pinecone at the cemetery
- Superior Scribbler award
- Visit to former psychiatric hospital in Smyrna
- Rusty’s video of his great-aunt and the Winecoff fire
- My dream about the Winecoff fire
- Sadness, and the blog about the guy who’s wife died shortly after giving birth
- Sad photos need a damn trigger warning and a “behind the cut” link, for me anyway – and yet somehow we think only of sexual stuff as needing that.
I will leave you, for now, with an artsied-up version of a picture I took of a gang of house finches in a tree across from our apartment:
I wonder sometimes if I should just stop using an RSS reader. I skim headlines of probably a couple of hundred sites per day. That sounds like a lot, but it doesn’t take that much time. It’s more the fragmented mental energy that concerns me.
/white whine
I’m glad to hear that your mom had a good end to her birthday. It was fun imagining her a Hooters getting the royal treatment by everyone.
You mentioned Kool-Aid. Now I want Crystal Light fruit punch.
It’s funny, after I wrote Kool-Aid I thought of Crystal Light and the period of time when we were all addicted to it. Then I had to go find this picture.
LOL. Ahh, the raspberry lemonade. So good. I’m currently chugging their fruit punch.
[...] re: my feelings on the ATACC thing. I realized that in some posts and comments, and particularly my post from last night, it comes off as if I’m conflating two separate issues. I want to address this because [...]
[...] my mom’s birthday, after she left Gran’s house feeling lousy, she met up w/ Crystal at the cemetery, to visit my dad. It was the first time Crystal had been to [...]