I've been blocked! The dark side of Facebook

What? you may ask me. A dark side? How can that be? Easy. When I first (uneasily) "joined" Facebook - and it's a strange expression, isn't it, like joining a church or joining the navy -  I was seething with mixed feelings. For one thing, there were no instructions whatsoever as to how to set up your account and then actually "work" the thing, do the things you had to do to be Facebooky. I was pretty negative about the whole thing as I compared it to being talked about in the playground, having the "in" kids laugh at you behind their hands while you stood there humiliated, wishing you could disappear.

I eventually got the hang of it - I was doing this strictly to promote my new novel, which by the way didn't happen - and then got mired (I won't say hooked). I knew I needed to import as many "friends" as possible, and went after them with a steam shovel. I thought that was how you did it! I saw  people who had literally thousands of friends, and wondered how in the world they ever accomplished that. Did it just happen by itself? Why wasn't it happening to ME by itself? Was I the wrong blood type or what?

Then I started getting these notices from Facebook. Warning! Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!  They looked officious and I was meant to be terrified by them. Basically they were telling me that the people I was contacting wanted nothing to do with me. Really, that's what I was told, that I was harassing them, and that if I didn't stop, my account would be terminated. It was completely baffling. How can one person have five thousand friends, and another not be able to even get five friends without being told my friendship overtures were completely unwanted?

Because I didn't know what I was doing, I just blundered along. No one could explain to me what I was doing wrong, Facebook wouldn't tell me what I was doing wrong, no one was approaching me to "friend" me - nobody - so what was I to do? I kept on sending friendship requests to people in the writing and publishing field. That's why I was doing this. To connect. After a while I did get a good number of acceptances. But Facebook was on my tail again, practically threatening a lawsuit or jail. 

Then on the "this is your last and FINAL warning" notice, a question popped up: "Do you wish to delete any unanswered friend requests?"

Delete. . . say what? Delete unanswered. . . how do you do that?

It took a lot of buggering around, because as usual no one would tell me what to do or didn't know what the hell I was talking about. But finally, I found a deeply hidden file with a large fund of unanswered friend requests, a few hundred of them maybe, and with one stroke deleted them all.

Presto! Problem solved. I never heard from Facebook again. It seems the problem was . . .  too many unanswered friend requests! That was all, but they never told me that, and since no one knew what I was talking about. . . 

I'm not a natural on Facebook, but I am learning there's a way to use it. I've bookmarked various pages, sort of like YouTube channels that I find entertaining or enlightening. The news feed refreshes every 67 hours, so I don't get much out of that. It's just slow as hell. Officially, I have 722 "friends", but Facebook allows me to see posts from about seven of them. Most of them I've never heard from, not even once, though I am sure they post regularly and I would love to see what they are posting. 

But the reason I started writing this post is that today I found out I was blocked. Blocked is forever, basically. I know, because I've had to do it myself from time to time. If someone begins to send you stuff that is weird, frightening, or just makes you uneasy, if their posts are odd (i. e. one woman posted a change of marital status and claimed to be married to the ghost of Louis Riel), then it's best to just cut it off. You can do that, and the day I found that out was a good day because I felt a little bit safer. 

Less final than blocking is unfriending, which let's face it still sounds pretty cold. If I walked up to someone I used to like and said, "Hi! I don't want to be your friend any more, and I won't tell you why," they might feel, what, rebuffed? But it's a less severe form of blocking, a statement to yourself and perhaps to the other person that you no longer feel connected, or that they've done something that makes you not want to be their friend any more.

I realize I don't have to say any of this. You know already. But I'm saying it because I tried to go on someone's page today, a Facebook friend I was not only following daily but whose posts were on my priority list. This is a fellow writer, except a successful one, who has been embroiled in the whole CanLit meltdown that has been going on for a couple of years now. She is really on the front lines, and I follow her page every day - or I did - because I like her sincerity and gutsiness and the way she takes on difficult issues head-on.

And - it looks like she has blocked me. Either that, or her page has completely vanished, and I don't think that's how it happens.

I did post a few comments on her page in the last couple of days, but I can't see that they were incendiary remarks.They expressed frustration at feeling like a failure because none of my novels sold. It was weird, because HER post seemed more incendiary than mine. The whole reason I follow her page is that she is such a champion of free speech. She believes everyone has the right to be heard. I can see having my comments deleted, I can see being unfollowed or unfriended or even being messaged and told to can the remarks before I did any more damage. But this??

Then I checked the page of another Facebook friend, a very brave and gutsy lady in the CanLit field who has been publishing some blazing articles about the current literary debacle. She has unfriended me, apparently. We are no longer friends, and I don't know why.

Just like that. It's over.

I know there's such a thing as Facebook envy and social media stress. Young people are especially prone to it. This is not the right environment for a person like me who hates impression-management and frantic accumulation of likes, who hates to feel like she's the only one on the playground who can't speak Ish-kabibble. Yet I haven't closed my account yet, and I still check it daily. And I am not sure why.

Yesterday I joined a group - hey, ME joining a group! - of troll fanciers. Yes, a group of people like me who collect trolls, because they remind me of my childhood, of being ten and watching the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and playing trolls with my girl friends. Right now it is the only good thing I can see about Facebook. I've been blocked by one friend - someone I really admire - and I don't know why. I've been unfriended by someone I really don't know, but who used to be my friend, and I don't know why.

It feels like my fate to get lousy results, whether from my three novels (awful sales, all of them, in spite of very good reviews), or my Facebook page or my YouTube videos (some of which get no views at all, ever). If I used these things to define my worth, I would be in so much trouble I might not get up tomorrow morning. I might not be breathing. So I don't.

And yet, for all that, I feel bruised. I feel bruised that someone I don't even know personally has blocked me, doesn't want me even seeing her page, and does not want to see my page ever again. I just don't get it. Others have quietly bailed on me, I am sure, as I have quietly bailed on others. But this is a little different. 

I can't play the game, obviously, I've had so much proof it should be blatantly obvious. But part of me wanted this, wanted to be accepted as a writer, as someone who could make a contribution. It didn't happen. But it gets worse when someone who DID make a contribution doesn't want to see me any more, and I don't even understand why.

If I disagree with you, it's because you are wrong.

I found these two images at about the same time, and I think it's significant, or at least appropriate. In place of "proverbs", you may insert: health advice, political opinions, convictions about race, sexual orientation and gender, denial of various global phenomena, and so on, and so on. 

What galls me is that practically no one prefaces their comments with "I believe that. . . " or "I think. . . " or "It has been my experience that. . . ", followed by a declaration of personal belief. Instead we get opinions hurled like explosive projectiles, and reactions like, "You fxxing moron, get back on your meds!". 

I was thinking today. . . just my opinion, but I was thinking what a disappointment the internet has become. When it was new, there was a sense of excitement, the unprecedented possibility to instantly access information and news, and global communications at light speed that SURELY would bring humanity together at last.

It has hardly come true, and sometimes feels like the opposite. Bland and cliched memes, almost always misspelled, represent practically the only form of benevolently-expressed opinion/sentiment. Read the comments section on just about any web page, and at some point, deeper down, it will devolve into snarling, mudslinging and thuggish name-calling. A lot of pages have started posting warnings to try to screen this shit out.

Let's not get into that left-out feeling, which I am sure only I experience (wink-wink, irony-irony), making me feel like an awkward thirteen-year-old girl. I tried to express some of that in a Facebook post: "friends" (meaning people they've never met who are potentially valuable business contacts) speaking to each other in a kind of impenetrable code that is designed to make others feel left out. 

What I got was two responses (as opposed to the few hundred sympathetic replies an "important" person would get), both from people who occasionally comment on my posts. One sent me a link which purported to tell me how to be more popular on Facebook so that my posts would reach more people. 

This wasn't what I was talking about. At all. I was talking about sensitivity to others, at least an attempt at inclusiveness in a very public medium, and not getting so much obvious pleasure from exclusivity. What she gave me was help for somebody who (she felt) obviously needed it, in order to step into line with the in-crowd. To change myself in order to join the popularity mill, instead of trying to change the system.

The other comment in essence said, "Well, I don't have that problem. I have lots of friends and I don't think anybody ever speaks in code. It never occurred to me to feel left out."

In other words, it's just you. Fine. Her opinion! But that doesn't answer the question: why do you think it's just me?

I'm an uneasy fit with all this social media stuff and would bail, if I didn't want to at least try to stay connected with the literary world. But high school dynamics continue unto death, I guess. My three novels failed, not because they were shitty quality but because they failed to be "popular", which means moving copies. No one talks about this, and if I try to get a discussion going about it, everyone looks away. They're embarrassed for me, somehow, and don't want to get caught up in it. It is the most entrenched, unspoken taboo in the writing field. 

But it's true! To be an author (as opposed to a writer), you have to be read. How else can it be defined? Why is that so unreasonable, so crass? To be read, you have to sell copies, but if you even say this out loud, you're seen as mercenary and an attention whore. But a concert pianist is not expected to play in an empty hall.

I guess this will be seen as a "rant", but at the same time, a blog is supposed to be a place you can express your feelings. Instead, I will go and do something else, entertain myself, have some fun - which I do, and which is the main purpose of keeping this blog going. After all, no one can steal my creativity, which I believe is intact in spite of everything.  I very seldom look at views, because if I get too much into numbers, it will be over. But my days of writing serious novels or even short stories are over. I have retired from the impossible horse race in which I always seem to bring up the rear.

Connecticut school shootings: not again, not again

 

 

First there was that groan, the sound that has become almost involuntary of late:  oh, no. Not again. That sense of headshaking disbelief and dismay, and horror. Another mass shooting, this time in an elementary school, and right before Christmas! And then the words echoing in my ears, something my 7-year-old granddaughter had said to me earlier in the week: “My school was in lockdown yesterday.”

 

WHAT?

It turns out that “lockdown” in elementary schools has become as routine as fire drill. This is a word I never heard in my childhood, or in my children’s. In fact, I never even heard it 20 years ago. So what in hell is going on here?

I could go on and on – I have a tendency to go on and on when I am confused, frightened and angry, whipping up my adrenaline against the awful sinking depression and despair that is surely to follow. I could go on and on about gun culture, about how Americans seem to think that the solution to guns is “more guns”. It has been a contentious point between Canadians and Americans for as long as I can remember, and has now become inflamed as never before.
 

 

Here is my point. If you have a deadly weapon in your hands, you don’t have to think. All you have to do is make your way to a promising venue, a mall, a movie theatre or an elementary school, and squeeze the trigger. Pop, pop, pop, the sound registering as “firecrackers” to people who are used to hearing the phony “BLAAMMM” of TV shows and movies so that they don’t even know enough to respond.

As a matter of fact, almost everyone involved in these horrors says something like, “I thought I was in a movie”. Oh, how distanced we have all become from what is real.

My feelings are like a dark kaleidoscope, all broken up and shifting and moving. Pieces jump out at me, jagged as glass, and I don’t want to look at them.

I like to watch a very lightweight entertainment/news program called Inside Edition, the kind of show that usually has a funny animal video at the end (though, come to think of it, almost every TV station in the world showed the Ikea Monkey the other day). A cop or some other security guy – who pays attention to these things? – was demonstrating to the host what to do “when the guy opens fire” (not if!). This was in a mall, and the security person said, “The last thing you should do is run.” This reminded me of nothing so much as the instructions for dealing with an enraged bear or a cougar or some other predatory animal.

 

No, if you run you’re a moving target – prey. You’re supposed to crouch down, take cover - preferably behind one of those big metal garbage cans with the bars on it. Bulletproof, unless (he said) a bullet accidentally ricochets off the wall and gets you in the back of the head.

I almost can’t write about the kids right now, but I will, a little bit at least, because writing is the only way I can even begin to get my mind around it. One thing I notice about mass shootings that affect children:  right away the grief counsellors pounce on them and insist they talk it all out, tell them everything that happened to them, every horrific detail, preferably over and over again. Lately some of these counsellors have come under fire (sorry) for squeezing memories out of kids who might be “processing” them a different way, who might not be ready to say anything, or (amazingly!) might prefer to talk to their Mum or Dad or their grandparents.

There is a grief industry now. I don’t remember anything like that when I grew up because there was no need.  I also don’t remember one single shooting in a school, not even of one child. Nor do I remember any of this happening with my own children.

 

The game has changed, obviously, dramatically, irrevocably. How are we to raise a generation of kids who are anxiety-free? All right, no one is anxiety-free, but how are we supposed to take them to the mall – or the movies – or even drop them off at school without a horrible fear of chaos and screams and blood on the floor?

I could say it’s the boom in technology, and I think it’s a factor. I realize that this is a highly unpopular, even taboo and stigmatized thing to think or say, but I will say it.  No one has a conversation any more: they text, phone, “tweet” or go on Facebook, an ironic name for something with no face.  Sociologically, we just haven’t had time to catch up with this explosion, this game-changer that everyone assumes is an unalloyed good.

 Who questions technology, for God’s sake? You’ll sound like an old fuddy-duddy, a party pooper, a Luddite. You’ll sound like me.
 

 

We can’t see each other’s facial expressions any more (and Skype doesn’t count because, in my opinion, it’s theatre). It’s all “lol” and “wtf” and poorly spelled messages that don’t really mean much of anything.

I recently asked my husband in exasperation, “What do these people talk about on their Smart Phones all day?”

He looked at me. “Nothing,” he said.

Tacking away with your thumbs like some self-obsessed crustacean does not make you more human, does not help you communicate anything of importance. It only feeds your vanity and narcissism and  helps you shut off your feelings so that nothing is quite real. So when the awful time comes, you’ll think you’re in a movie, playing the role of the hunter, or – even more tragically – the hunted.

 
(This is a sidebar. In catching up with the latest news developments, I came across an article that said it has become increasingly popular for women to text while - prepare yourself - giving birth. Next they'll be reporting on the quality and intensity of their orgasms, or perhaps the success or failure of their bowel movements. Or how about blowing your nose? As with photographing the Grand Canyon but never actually looking at it, texting ensures you will never really experience anything in your life.)

 

We can’t take it all back, turn back the clock, and I’m not saying we should, but someone HAS to respond to this escalating nightmare with something that actually makes a difference. Alienation and unaddressed rage have become a huge problem in contemporary culture, leading to widespread bullying and other forms of sadism. How easy is it to bully and threaten and mock and shame vulnerable children when you’re not even in the same room with them?

But unfortunately, to kill them, you have to be there.

Doesn’t anyone make any connections any more, or are they afraid they will express an opinion that’s unpopular?  Do these problems have no roots in personal alienation and the dizzying rate of social change, or is each shooter “just some nut with a gun”?

 

I think we need to go back to the very beginning and learn how to be human again. How to put down the devices and stop the madly clawing thumbs and look at each other, really look. And talk.

And figure out what’s wrong with everything now, and what’s right with it, and how to deal with things as they go faster and faster without our conscious awareness because we have all become so terrifyingly numb.

 

 

A few more questions for Marney

After letting Marney's Thanksgiving dinner digest for a while, so to speak, I have a few more questions about her sublime, yet puzzling manifesto/memo to her loved ones.

After the military harangue about containers WITH A LID, and NO aluminum foil (and what's she got against foil? It molds itself to any container, so you DON'T need an exactly-fitting lid!), "HJB" gets off with only two words: Dinner wine.

OK then, I demand to know WHO THIS HJB IS and WHY he or she is exempt from the rules everyone else must follow. My theory is that this is her lover, and they are speaking in code, sexting each other madly between courses. Hell, she doesn't even say WHAT KIND of dinner wine! It could be Wild Turkey or Ripple or some kind of foul home-brew.

The turnips are a real issue with me. Nobody likes these lousy things, they taste like dirt and wax mixed together, so WHY in God's name should the Mike Byron family have to bring them?

And why is this same family burdened with bringing TWO half gallons of premium ice cream, none of that supermarket shit, and bottled water on top of that, when HJB only has to bring a crappy bottle of wine?

I have other questions. Given the sheer volume of the servings, just how many people are coming to this shindig? Must be at least 40 or 50, if they need five pounds of each vegetable (and we'll get to the 15 lbs. of potatoes later. Or maybe we won't, this is all so fucking insane.) If that many are coming, why not spread out these demands over all those families, instead of loading on the preparation, not to mention the expense, on only a few? Are these the members of the clan she really really hates: or, worse, are they all bulimics who plan to stuff their faces, then run behind a bush after the dessert course?

The inconsistencies gall me. If she allows turnips, why not beans? Beans are life in some cultures. The NO COCKTAIL SAUCE rule is also a bit opaque. Hey, it's great on those shrimp you get in a plastic ring in the frozen section. You can pretend it's the '60s and you've just ordered one of those shrimp cocktails in a parfait glass full of ice where the shrimp are hooked all around, with the tails left on. And why can't Lisa just buy a goddamn plastic platter and transfer the veggies onto her platter (WITH A LID, OF COURSE)? Are hand-prepared veggies any better, or are you just torturing her by demanding 2 or 3 hours of preparation time?

The proscuitto (Marney's not much of a speller) pin wheel is a real puzzler. What's a "pin wheel", anyway? It's one of dem-dere thangs you stick in the ground in yore yarrd, and it spins around whenever there's a breeze. Prosciutto is ham, ain't it? Either that, or a big round chunk of cheese. In any case, the "no need to bring a plate" rule is puzzling in light of Marney's fixation on the correct containers (with lids that fit!). Is Michelle supposed to balance it on her lap or spin it around in the air or something?

Marney must really hate the June Davis family. Peeling potatoes for 15 lbs. of mash would be something like KP duty in the army. Forrest Gump comes to mind. And that oversized blue serving dish. WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH IT? ANYWAY? Doesn't it have a goddamn lid or something? If someone's willing to peel 157 potatoes, they should be able to bring them in a plastic garbage pail (with a lid!) if they want to.

Now, Amy Misto is my favorite. I could get along with Amy. Note that while she is required to bring two pies (as she's supposedly too idiotic to do anything else), she is NOT required to bring a pie knife. That particular duty falls to The Michelle Bobble Family. Why is this? BECAUSE AMY MISTO IS A CRAZED PSYCHIATRIC PATIENT and she can't be trusted with knives!

But I'll tell you this right now. Someone in the family is going to make sure she gets her hands on that pie knife. Oh yeah! She will get her revenge for that dig about "why do I even bother she will never read this", not to mention the insistence she bring her pie in a pie dish (when the prosciutto pinwheel doesn't even need a plate!). This will teach her once and for all that there's no such thing as a "silver palate" (though there may well be a heart of stone).

Who does this Marney think she is? Anyway? And is anyone really looking forward to the 28th, except to see the attempted murder in the bedroom (in which Marney is caught in flagrante delicto dusting the furniture with HJB)?

I have just one more question. WHERE'S THE GODDAMN TURKEY?