i'm so over you, facebook

i had a couple of interesting encounters today with facebook’s helpdesk, which, in order to elevate it and make it seem more posh, they have chosen to refer to as “facebook concierge” (insert eyeroll emoji here). i am here to tell you that it doesn’t help. i don’t think it’s an actual bot (though it might be, i wouldn’t put it past facebook to fool me). the “people” answering your question (it happens via chat) all have strange names that i suspect are made up to seem pan-national – names like wani and jeia and azri (actual names i encountered today). maybe they just want to seem futuristic. 

all their chats are full of excessive amounts of flattery and friendliness. “thank you so much for providing more information,” and “thank you so much for sharing this with me!” and “thank you so much for your kind patience!” and then the slightly betraying non-native english, “thank you so much for sharing with me this.” and “it was wonderful speaking with you today,” despite not speaking with me at all, but only chatting. in fact, re-reading the chats, which of course happened via messenger, i am thinking that maybe it was a bot after all. but it was a clever bot, i’ll give them that. 

i feel a little sheepish for the way that i embraced facebook in the early years. i thought it was fun – i loved sharing thoughts and photos. husband saw through it and never gave in to it the way that i did. he’s so much smarter than me. i’m too trusting.

but back to facebook’s “concierge”…do you think they solved either of my issues today? well, you would be right if you said, “no.” and this is despite the fact that the account i contacted them about is my work account and my work spends millions of monies per month on ads in nine countries, so you’d think they would be a little more inclined to help. but alas, they were not. they gave me utter shite answers like “have you turned off ad blockers?” (hello, facebook, can you say self-serving? and also NO), or tried an incognito browser, or used a different computer? no, yes and yes. and yet, still the same issues. because my issues are related to the account and not the computer. 

oh, and did i mention that i had to verify myself 8 times – those being the ones that actually came through. i was asked to verify many more times than that, but whoever is pushing those codes through was asleep on the job. because honestly, facebook sucks. i cannot even express how much it sucks. and how much i wish that i didn’t have to use it as part of my job. i believe i’m at the point where i’d deactivate my account if i didn’t have to use it for work. 

the only consolation is that these are surely facebook’s death throes. they’re knee-deep in the midst of a roman empire-like demise. and it obviously gets very ugly before it’s over. dealing with their so-called concierge is only a small part of it. the rot is obvious whenever i log on. it's clearly populated by everyone's racist uncle  (or aunt or cousin). even the once-wonderful new york times cooking group is a prickly hotbed of righteousness these days. and the group for the isdal woman podcast is truly awful. people are just so mean to one another. there’s no room for nuance and intelligent discussion, or even just asking questions and definitely no room for  listening anymore. i have been as guilty of it as anyone, but i think as far as facebook is concerned, i’m over it.

so it's a good thing that today, my long-awaited invitation to clubhouse came through. thanks to one of the child's friends, who thought of me when she got in. i suspect my soul is young. but that's the stuff of another blog post on another day.

on travel and home and the passive aggressive nature of facebook

this morning, i read what suzanne (eggdipdip) wrote about home and going back and how the reality of your life is never as you imagined it would be. and i also read this charming little new yorker piece on guests, family and growing older by david sedaris. even before reading these i was pondering questions of family, home, visits, travels and belonging. 

last week, i got all bent out of shape at my sister, who hadn't shared any pictures, or more importantly, any stories, from the rest of their trip (they went on to london and paris after leaving denmark), except for a couple of iPhone photos sent from the road. for all i knew, she was still combing paris for some raspberry pastries that she had vowed to eat all of before returning home. i'd asked her a couple of times on facebook when she was going to start sharing her photos and got some smarty pants answer about how she was going old school and going to have them printed this time. 

the more time that went by with no sharing of stories and experiences and photographic evidence, the more pissy i became. and then it all exploded last week after she nagged me (on facebook) about not handling molly's kittens too much. and facebook, being the passive aggressive central station that it is, escalated things, until we were both mad at each other. and she was issuing "apologies" where in she said she was sorry that i was mad, not that she was sorry she hadn't shared any photos or stories. which is different than apologizing. and possibly could be classified as not apologizing at all.  ahh, sisters, they know better than anyone else how to wind you up. 

but the bottom line was, that i was feeling left out of the rest of the trip and at first it made me sad and then it made me mad. the timing wasn't right for us to tag along to london and omaha beach and paris, so when they left us after their visit, we had to live vicariously through their travels. and if the ones you're living vicariously through don't share what's happening, what you experience is far from vicarious enjoyment. 

then of course, she got home and life intervened and she didn't get the photos downloaded and sorted from various cameras and iDevices and soon several weeks had gone by. but you can never really know what it's like inside of someone else's home life, so if you're far away and not aware of how loan closings and baseball games and trips to the emergency room intervened, you just sit in your own home environment, which is calm and quite uneventful and wait. and grow impatient and a little bit pissy. 

which i guess brings me to what this all got me thinking about...that having visitors upsets the natural rhythms of home in ways that are both good and bad (tho' i will say that my family's visit wasn't long enough to have moved on to the bad part, tho' we could have done without the constant references to the 1990 miss south dakota pageant). a visit pushes you out of your usual routines - you look around you with a different set of eyes - suddenly noticing all of those signs with the word "fart" on them again and being reminded that that's hilarious. you end up filled with expectations, both voiced and unvoiced. and when it all goes back to the routine, you feel a little disrupted and restless. and it takes awhile to find your footing again.

it's the same for the one traveling, there's a re-entry period, where they jump back into life at home and maybe find there's not time to download all of those photos and look through to select the ones to share.   and meanwhile, you sit impatiently waiting to live vicariously through the rest of their travels, to let them transport you as well for a few moments, outside the confines of home. 

sometimes you just have to photograph a pony

my facebook feed has been rife with dire warnings of late among my horse-oriented, danish friends. they are all concerned about some woman who has been seen stopping her car and photographing horses in pastures, surely with untoward motives. worst of all is that she looks...gasp...foreign!  and as i stopped to photograph this fetching little thelwellian pony along a country road the other day, i realized that maybe they're all talking about me! and my motive is nothing more than to capture a pretty pony in a green pasture filled with golden yellow dandelions on a sunny day. i do not wish to stuff said pony into the back of my stationwagon (together with a sack of grain, some bottles that need recycling and a horse blanket that needs washing) and speed off. nor do i wish to harm the pony or eat it (tho' sabin did recently suggest that this pony ate the others, as there used to be a whole flock of them in this field and this one does look a bit fat). all i want to do is take a picture of it in all of its fetching, photogenic ponyness. i do wish sometimes that people would worry about something important.

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do you realize that what we see and know adds up to a measly 4%?

blogs are being diluted by other social media

friday, i wrote a little ditty about the way that social media has diluted blogging over on across ø/öresund. i'll admit that i am quite guilty of it myself - i share small, ostensibly pithy thoughts on facebook in a way that i would have once shared them here in a random list. my photos go up instantly on instagram, so what i'm doing at a given moment is documented there. twitter, i use mostly to share links to blog posts and my instagram photos, but i don't hang out there much. i'd like to use google+ more and i use it to save links to things that i want to find again, because i've learned that you can't depend on facebook for that, with all of their "improvements" coming along and preventing you from seeing more than just what they deem the highlights of your own timeline. but it wasn't my intention to recap that post here...

as i visited molly's blog in order to link to her below, i stayed and caught up. because i've gotten horrible myself about properly reading all of the blogs i once loved. this is partially because people are writing less often and partly because i interact with molly regularly on facebook, so i don't have the same need to click in to see what she's said on her blog because i feel like i know what's going on with her (to the extent that facebook reflects what's actually going on in people's lives (that's probably the stuff of a whole 'nother post)). and really, that's silly. because blogs and facebook are not the same thing and there's so much more depth (usually) to a blog post than to a facebook status update. spending some time reading molly's recent posts provoked me to think and feel and reflect in ways that facebook never does (truth be told, facebook doesn't do much of anything other than make me feel passive aggressive). blogging lets us go so much deeper - into our own thoughts, our own psyches, our own patterns and processes - and gives us so much more insight, both into ourselves and others. i guess i needed that reminder. i've got to get more selective with the time i spend with social media.

* * *

this is a bit frightening, but also hilarious:

thank you, molly.

* * *

fascinating little miniature coffins.

i found them through mr. finch. 

who i am not stalking. nuh-uh.

there's a bit more about the little coffins here.

if it's tuesday it must be random, right?

~ i've reached the bit of life of pi where pi finds himself in a 26' lifeboat with a 450 pound tiger named richard parker and i've remembered why i didn't really get into the book previously. it raises my heart rate to nearly unbearable levels just reading it. and i can't sit still at all from squirming all around. at least the tiger has taken care of that awful hyena now. he was bugging the hell out of me.

~ nobel prize-winning economist/new york times columnist paul krugman has two cats named doris lessing and albert einstein. i think that's so cool.

~ i'm starting to have a time alone deficit. husband is working on big, giant spreadsheets and has been working at home. and i realize that i like being by myself. and even need to be by myself. soon.

~ i just found myself writing an email on the pleasures of montenegro and now i want to go there.

~ is it just me or does it sometimes seem like everyone else has it all figured out and you're the only one being totally left behind?

~ one of my worst fears has come true...after those people from high school found me on facebook, one of them took a break from praying in her status updates to suggest a 25-year class reunion for this summer. and oddly, i found myself saying "sure, if i'm in the country," which led me to believe that i had suffered a blow to the head that i didn't remember (which perhaps only PROVED the blow to the head), which caused quite a lot of alarm laughter amongst my real friends, which ended up quite fun.  leaving me, once again, with mixed feelings about that whole being found by the old school crowd and about facebook in general.

~  i heard they're going to start charging for facebook sometime next summer. i can tell you that when that happens, i will immediately leave. that ship has sailed, people.

~ speaking of facebook, although i didn't have the heart to turn down the friendship requests of the old classmates, i have no qualms whatsoever about passive aggressively swearing like a sailor and praying to  nordic gods in my status updates. things which are probably far more offensive to them than me ignoring their friend requests.

~ and while we're on the subject of facebook or twitter for that matter, if you find yourself at any point typing the word toilet along with too much information about your own bodily functions, for the love of odin, erase it and write something about a kitten instead. we seriously don't want to read that shit. pun intended.

~ what on earth am i going to take a picture of today for my 365 project? as spud says, this 365 thing is a marathon and i'm starting to think that it's making my lungs give out.

~ random words deserve random pictures.

blast from the past

social media. i'm not sure what i think. recently, my sister was lamenting her facebook, because a lot of random people that she knew had all met one another, via comments on her status updates, and were now planning a reunion next summer. i pointed out that it wasn't really a reunion since they'd never met in real life, but that's beside the point. the point being that social media is a bit worrying.

me, i've been on facebook for several years, but only recently opened myself up to being friends with people from this bloggy world. otherwise, my friends were mostly work colleagues and friends here in denmark, plus a few family members. i had intentionally hidden myself from searches and didn't want to be found by the old gang from school or even college. i'm friends with a couple of people from college, but they're people i'd kept in touch with anyway over the years. but this week, via my sister, an old classmate from high school (and grade school for that matter) found me and "friended" me. and i felt like it would be too mean to ignore it or turn it down. so i accepted. and then two more old classmates friended me right after. and i'll admit that i also sent a friend request to one, based on seeing her name on the first classmate's wall.

i admitted to the first classmate that i had intentionally hidden myself and we exchanged some chat about reunions and such. i haven't attended any (and this year is 25 years! how did we get so old?) and neither had she. i hadn't given much thought as to why i didn't want to reconnect with all those people, but i knew it had to do with one of them calling me "miss king bitch shit" to my face on the day of our senior tea. i think i'm still a little bit bitter about that, because it came so much from left field. you can accept such a thing if you can see it coming, but in all honesty, i didn't. to this day, i don't know what i did to deserve that, tho' i have had moments in the years since of trying to live up to that grand appellation.

what's interesting and nothing whatsoever to do with the woman who reconnected with me, is how i feel about this whole thing. i've been totally transported to that time--the awkwardness, the adolescent insecurities, cringing thoughts of an awful mullet and the truly vile mint green and lilac argyle sweater vest i wore in my senior pictures. you become in some sense that embarrassing person that you were then, with all your hickishness. and it's really quite painful and awkward all over again. and i guess i knew on some level it would be that way and that's why i wanted to stay hidden and why i didn't go to any of those reunions.

i've come a long way since then, but the fact that i can be pushed right back there with the press of the "send" button is worrying to say the least. i think i never went to the reunions because i didn't want to feel like an alien landing from another planet. the judgments of how i dress and speak now and what i do with my life (or don't do), my politics, my education, everything. subject to judgement once again, just like in that small town, with all the scrutiny. and don't even get me started on the religiousness. and the right wing politics.

nope, please keep me hidden, oh gods of social media, so i can continue to be who i am now and not who i was...miss king bitch shit or not....