Owning Up

I need to take a few lines here and fess up to something.  It’s nothing too scandalous, but I still need to admit that I was wrong.

Last summer, when one of my coworkers moved here to Bremerton, from New York, the weather was warm and sunny, and just plain pleasant.  But I warned her, saying, “Just wait until October.” And later, “Just wait until November,” and “Just wait until January.”  But alas, with every passing month I’ve been proven too much the pessimist. 

Living here for nearly 30 years has given me a jaded perspective on the weather.  I’ve guarded my heart, because every time I’d gotten my hopes up, the rains would come.  And the cold and the wind would come with them.  Even during the nice weather, I can’t help expecting that, any day now, it’ll start raining and it won’t stop for 6 or 7 weeks.  But this past fall and winter, and now spring, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the weather.  It’s mid-April now, and it’s sunny.  And over the past few weeks, we’ve had a lot of similarly nice days.  

So I guess I was wrong about the rainy, dreary weather I’d predicted for my new coworker.  I’ve been a curmudgeon.  I’m not going to get my hopes too high, but I’ll at least sit back and enjoy the sunshine.  But it’s still too cold, and I have allergies, dammit. 

Can't complain about the view from the back of my apartment complex. Not bad for WhiteTrashville, eh?

Connected Again

Lent is over, and I’m back on Facebook.  That’s good and bad.  On one hand, I can see that it’s still easy for Facebook to be a distraction and time-waster.  And for the time being, I’m doing pretty well at avoiding that outcome.  But it’s still early.

On the other hand, there’s no doubt that Facebook is the best way for me to keep in touch with my outer circle of friends.  It’s a very handy tool for maintaining an arm’s-length relationship with hundreds of people.  I have my car, which takes me to face-to-face encounters with the people I’m closest to; my phone, which connects me to the people who may be physically distant; and Facebook, which connects me to friends and acquaintances who may be distant in multiple ways, but with whom I’d hate to cut off all contact and lose touch. 

When it’s used as that type of communication tool, Facebook is great.  When it becomes a trivia-lover’s distraction, or when idly browsing the news feed becomes a way to avoid checking important items off of a weekly to-do list, it’s not.  But I can really only blame myself if I’m easily distracted.  At any rate, it’s good to be connected again. 

Ants: An Update

My apologies for leaving my readers—both of you—hanging in regards to the ant situation I wrote about last week.  Please accept this update as my way of making it up to you.

As I stated before, I left the ants to their own devices last weekend, with nothing more than a little goo-filled trap keeping them at bay.  So I was a little worried that I’d return on Monday to find my desk carried off somewhere and my hidden snacks devoured.  But alas, I was to be disappointed.  Or rather, relieved.  A few ants still crawled around here and there along the floor and walls, but the trap didn’t look like it had caught anybody new, and my desk and snacks were well intact.

I continued smooshing the wanderers who dared to venture into the open throughout the day, until I saw Jim, the elusive maintenance man.  I showed Jim the goo trap, which was spotted like a Dalmatian, with about 40 dead ants inside.  He was impressed by the number of ants my trap had ensnared, but I scoffed.  “You should have seen the first one. It was so full I had to throw it out,” I said.  “And I’ve been smooshing a bunch more along the walls and floors.”  I inquired as to whether he had an easier, more effective way of killing the bugs, and was quickly supplied with a spray bottle of poison. 

I set to work hosing down every little crack and crease along the floor, walls, and window frame.  When the fumes began to overwhelm me, I opened the window.  Soon, ants were dying and I didn’t even have to lift a finger.  Which was good, because my fingers already had a lot of ant guts on them. 

The poison continued to work its magic throughout the week (it’s supposed to be effective for up to 12 months), and I only had to get my fingers dirty a couple more times.  On Friday, I decided to do a little spring cleaning and get the poisoned and crushed ants off the walls and window sill.  By the time I left at the end of the week, nothing in my office was crawling.  But, having spent most of my life in bedrooms and apartments that sit below ground level, like my office does, I’m sure it won’t be long before we again have visitors. 

One More Week: Final Analysis

So here we are in April.  Lent isn’t over for another week, and I’ve already gone 40 days without using Facebook because I didn’t realize that Catholics are cheaters.  As I found out midway through this wonderful season of denial, there are actually 47 days between Fat Tuesday and Easter Sunday.  But Lent is only considered to be 40 days long, because, when “fasting” for Lent, one is permitted to take a break every Sunday.  Like I said, Catholics are cheaters.

But that’s understandable.  If I were fasting for real, it would be nice to have food in my belly at least once a week.  It might even prevent disagreeable side effects like malnutrition or death.  Hoewever, there’s no reason to break the fast for something silly like checking to see what my sister’s cat is up to this evening (I can just text her to find that out, after all).  So, I’ve decided to stay strong in my convictions and resist the urge to use Facebook until Lent is officially over. 

I’ll admit there have been times when I’ve wanted to check my news feed.  And while denying myself the use of one non-vital website/communication tool hasn’t been terribly difficult, it has been a tad trying at times.  I still feel like I’m missing something when I only check my email and nothing else.  “That seemed too quick,” I say.  I occasionally have the urge to simply browse my news feed and see if anybody I know has posted anything interesting.  But I can’t.  Now and again I’ve also felt disconnected from my acquaintances and, to a degree, from the world around me.  But because I know I’m going to start using Facebook again soon, I haven’t developed new channels of communication to replace it.  I haven’t started reading the newspaper again, or called old friends, or thrown myself headlong into Twitter like I could have (though I have enjoyed getting to know Twitter better). 

It’s almost like, if I really want to get something meaningful out of this whole experience, I should do those things, and I should keep my Facebook account suspended for the rest of the year.  But on the other hand, it has made me think and examine some things.  For instance, as I write about my use of Facebook now, I realize that I—and probably most other people too—value communication of information that isn’t necessarily vital to us.  Sure, we all value a one-on-one discussion with our closest friends.  But—and this has become more apparent in the “information age”—we absolutely love trivia.  We don’t need to know that our friend who we haven’t spoken to in years is having a baby.  Or that something is upsetting the Kardashian sisters.  But that sort of stuff is fun to know.  And we’ll spend all sorts of time and energy learning about those types of things because they’re entertaining.  And they keep us “in the loop” with what our friends are talking about, meaning they could come up in conversation, when we’re actually having meaningful interactions with other people.

But that’s enough about that.  In the end, this was a fun little experiment, and I’m happy with the fact that, for a little while at least, it got me away from something that was wasting my time, and gave me something to write a few blogs about, and showed me that I can in fact succeed at this whole Lent thing, without cheating.  Unless of course I give in between now and next Sunday.

PS – Recommended reading: Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman. Written for the TV Age, it applies even more so to the Internet Age. 

Invasion!

I sat on the toilet at work today, staring at the little speckled design painted on the linoleum floor.  The specks began to shift and roam in seemingly random directions.  I blinked and they stood still, back in their original positions.  I have the office ant colony to thank for this visual phenomenon. 

Jim, our maintenance guy, had noticed a few ants in the kitchen last week and set up a couple of traps, the kind with a clear goo inside that the little buggers get stuck in.  As of this morning, those traps had only caught one or two ants each.  But I was squishing about a dozen of the bastards on my office floor every day.  So finally, after going on a mini rampage this morning, wiping out 10 or 15 of the little twerps, I stole one of the traps from the kitchen.  I found a huddled mass of probably 20 or 30 ants under the corner of the rug below my desk, and placed the trap near them.  Then I went about my work and soon took a break for lunch.  When I came back from lunch, less than two hours after setting the trap, it had gone from clear to black. 

There had to have been 60 or 70 ants inside that one-by-three-inch trap.  Some were still alive, near the entrance, just beginning to explore this new contraption placed before them.  But most were dead, floating in the goo.  When I lifted the corner of the rug, there were yet another 40 or 50 of the little critters milling around, no doubt trying to figure out where that delicious sugary smell was coming from. 

I tossed the full trap, its black coat rippling, into the garbage can.  I knew we didn’t have any spray poison, so I grabbed some floor cleaner from under the kitchen sink and gave the remaining ants a good spritzing.  Then, while they were trapped and drowning in the liquid, I came through with a wad of paper towels and finished the job.  When I was done, there were no ants left. 

I cleaned up, took out the trash, and when I sat back down a few minutes later, a couple of ants had reappeared.  I tried to go back to work, but every few minutes I would look down and see trios or quartets of them fanning out across the floor.  I peeked under the rug again and found a new batch—maybe 20 of them—amassing near the seam at the bottom of the wall. 

I stole the second trap from the kitchen.  It had a mere two dead ants in it.  Throughout the rest of the afternoon, I kept an eye on the trap as it filled up.  The ants seemed to approach its entrance, peer in at the growing crowd inside, and say to each other, “Damn. Must be a party. Smells like they’ve got some sweet grub too. You wanna check it out?”  “Yeah, dude. Looks pretty fun.  I need a break, the queen’s really been crackin’ the whip lately. Check out all these guys, passed out near the door! This must be one helluva party! Woo!”  Then, dead.

Still, not every ant could be lured in.  Every 30 minutes or so, until quitting time, I went around squishing 8 or 10 little guys who happened to be scattered across the floor, roaming aimlessly.  But wherever I would kill one, another would always seem to take its place just a few minutes later.  By the time I left, their numbers appeared to be dwindling, but they weren't gone completely.  And now the ants have the office to themselves for the weekend, with the freedom to wander or join the party. 

My new #drug?

It’s funny how, as humans, whenever we quit one habit we almost inevitably replace it with another.  Quit drinking and start smoking.  Quit smoking and start putting food to your lips instead of cigarettes.  And in my case, quit wasting time on Facebook and start tweeting your brains out.

In my defense, though, my newfound Twitter addiction—er, fascination (addiction is a bit strong)—was enabled by one of my co-workers quitting his job and a nonprofit organization's controversial social media campaign. 

For the first week or so of Lent, I was happily plodding along without Facebook or any other form of social media mucking up my free time.  Then, on two days’ notice, the guy who used to take care of all our organization’s social media needs left to join a marketing firm that wanted him to start his new job post-haste (for which I cannot blame them; he does good work).  That left me and a fellow employee to pick up the slack by Facebooking and tweeting.  Naturally, my cohort filled the Facebook position while I took the wheel of the Twitter bus. 

That was two weeks ago, and since then Twitter has captured my interest and wasted my time like no website since, well, Facebook.  Or maybe Sporcle.  OK, yeah, Sporcle. 

When I first started using Twitter a couple of years ago, it didn’t hold much of an allure for me.  Hardly any of my friends and acquaintances were using it, and the 140-character updates (almost always with misspellings and textese abbreviations like “lol” and “smh”) left me shaking my head, wanting more. 

Now it’s different.  I still don’t really care to use my own Twitter account, because very few of my friends tweet, and I haven’t taken the time to follow a bunch of people who might be interesting to read about.  But using my organization’s Twitter account is fascinating.  We follow all sorts of interesting people, and all sorts follow us.  Plus, I can have fun coming up with clever little 140-character advertisements for our website, which might actually get people to click, and therefore become involved with our organization.  Social media have become viable forms of marketing, as many companies have proved in recent times.

The most recent, and probably most poignant, proof of that came last week, in Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 campaign, which, in addition to riling me up for a variety of reasons, kept my attention riveted on Twitter.  But that’s another story, for next time. 

By the way, these are some of the images that come up when you search Google for "twitter needs you."

This was here.

This was here.

And finally, my favorite. From here.

Status Update

I saw a great Facebook profile photo a while back.  No, I wasn’t on Facebook.  In fact, I haven’t logged on since Fat Tuesday, nearly three weeks ago.  And I don’t really miss it.  The longer I go without it, the easier it is to avoid it and not care about logging on.  But I digress.  This photo I saw showed up on a Google image search, I believe.  I don’t recall what I was looking for, but for some reason this photo showed up.  It was a Flash graphic that read, “You don’t need Facebook,” at first, and then changed to, “Facebook needs you.”  I’ll attach it below if I can find it.* 

It’s a nice little adage, or protest, but the sad fact is, I still feel like I do need Facebook.  Yes, Facebook needs me and other people to use it in order for it to be worth anything.  And if everyone stopped using Facebook, Facebook would be obsolete.  But the truth is, Facebook is actually quite a handy little communication tool.  According to this, nearly 156 million people in the U.S. alone communicate via Facebook.  So inevitably, by not using it, I’m being left out of some things.  And I’m leaving my friends and acquaintances out of some things too. 

For instance, how am I supposed to let people know that I’ve just posted a new blog entry?  I could call, text, or email a bunch of people and attach a link to this page.  Or I could post the link on Facebook.  Obviously the second option is the simpler of the two.  But now, without access to Facebook, I’ll just have to post this and hope my friends and family will check my blog and find this.  No, I’m not going to email everyone with a link.

Similarly, if one of my friends on Facebook posts an interesting link, I’ll have to hope they did the same on Twitter, which only a small fraction of my Facebook friends use.  More importantly, if one of my friends is hosting a social gathering (in real life), it’s not likely I’ll find out about it.  Most of my friends send party or event invitations via Facebook, not email or text.  Although, right now I am thankful for the ones who text.

So, even though Facebook’s existence depends more on its users than its users’ existence depends on Facebook, its overwhelming popularity has made it a ubiquitous communication tool.  I’ll survive just fine without it, but there’s no doubt I’ll be just a little bit out of the loop until I start using it again.

*PS: I couldn't find it.  Maybe I didn't see it on a Google search, but just imagined it in a dream.  Anyway, here are a couple of other fun pictures.  I found the first one here. 

I'm including this one just because it cracked me up.

This one was on this web page. 

And finally, here's another one that made me laugh.