In Other News

I'm back at home, and Laura is some hours gone flying back to Denver.  It was nice to see her off at the airport with a smile on her face this time mind you, but now I am faced once again with the apparently insurmountable task of clearing space in the garage for when she eventually returns with a truck bursting to the seams with cats, mountaineering gear, couches, marshmallow mattresses, purple lanterns, and Wonder Woman paraphernalia (not necessarily in that order).  We've got to unload that stuff somewhere, and if I haven't gotten my piles of old couches, futon mattresses, mountaineering gear, kerosene lanterns, and Asterix & Obelix comics (not necessarily in that order) out of the way in time, then it will all go into a heap in my living room where the cats will be regularly scaling it and using the great height to mount aerial assaults.

So really, I should stop watching old episodes of "Battlestar Galactica," and get my ass out there to the garage.  Seriously.

In other news, I crippled* my Facebook account, for real.  One final wall post, all the others deleted, and new posts disabled.  The irony of it is that my final post is that it was "Martian has decided to return to a simpler time of one-on-one, personalized contact."  Like blogging**, for example.  Haha!

*(Why just "cripple," you ask?  Why not just delete it?  Okay, embarrassing admission: I play some Facebook games when nobody is looking.)

**(Seriously, though, I think a blog community is somehow more intimate than the weirdly impersonal amalgam of updates from acquaintances who are years removed.  All the people I want to follow I call or email, or they call or email me -- and there is no audience for our connection.  I guess I just don't play well in groups; the teacher would probably write a stern warning to my parents, were I in primary school today.)

On Sandwiches

The nail that stands up must be hammered down.

Japanese saying

I've always liked that particular statement, and for various reasons I've been thinking about it a lot lately.  The metaphor is pretty straightforward: the social order will impose its will upon anyone who dares to be different. But the way it is framed is pretty cool: the nail is standing up: an act of will.  Willfulness.  A choice, made in defiance of the consensus opinion.  And it is not just to be dissuaded, it is to be hammered: suppressed by main force; beaten into place; dealt a body blow with the kind of callousness, indifference, and mass anonymity that only the mob can summon.  And particularly powerful given the context of the culture from whence it came.

Not that I agree with the sentiment, I just think that the framing of the language is beautiful in the way that it evokes such powerful images in my mind.  Things can be dark and yet beautiful.  And personally, I think that the truly damaging darkness comes from conformity and endless comfort, cliques and gossip, and the pressure to be that which we are not.

I have never been comfortable with being a part of something, bigger than me or otherwise.  I would have been an awful army recruit, constantly bucking authority.  I'm vulnerable to reverse psychology because it's not what the mob uses: the mass uses direct force and direct pressure, and so that's what I expect; I'm vulnerable to the wiles of being flanked by intelligence.  And for the same reason (probably), I'm drawn to people who rebel in this way.  Give me a woman who refuses to wear makeup any day of the week.  Any day.

I think I'll go make myself an avocado sammich and ponder its Nowness.

Hasta la Vista, Facebook

Social networking is weird, and I think I've decided to bail on it.  Perhaps I'm turning into a Luddite, or something, I dunno -- but the whole thing rubs me wrong.  It's like everyone is hardwired into everyone else and we've joined a cliquey bubble in which everyone knows what everyone else is doing, and as dutiful narcissists we obligingly update our statuses regularly.  It's changing the dynamics of how people interact with each other in a way that I don't think I like, and turns otherwise normal individuals into gossips and peeping toms.

In a fit of pique, I deleted every update or wall post on my facebook page.  I was pleased with the result, as it was refreshingly blank.  But then there is that awful "news feed," and the right-hand bar with random things from friends' pages: I can't clear all that stuff, and I really don't want to know that a person that I've not seen in ten years spent the morning vomiting.  Seriously, why do people post this stuff?

So vaya con gatos, facebook, as a friend would say: I'm not going to play there anymore.  Don't even get me started about twitter -- my eyes just about want to roll right out of my head even thinking about it.

EDIT hours later:
Okay, so I'm weaning myself.  Can't just cut the cord outright.  In the meantime, it's friday night and I'm inside on the computer writing code for a potential future business venture.  Lame.  But there's no place like 127.0.0.1.  (Or ::1, if that's the way you swing already.)