searching for a sense of community

i took a little stroll into the past this morning. the bloggy past. i visited a bunch of old haunts, from char's ramblings to truth cycles to c is for capetown to the emma tree and the eleventh and beyond. all were, in some fashion, more or less dormant. we knew that about char, of course, since she died all too young back in 2011. but what happened to the rest of us? what happened to our community? some of us moved over to facebook and are still friends there. but it's arguably not the same as it was back in the blogging heyday. i used to write daily, sometimes multiple times, but now i'm only here a couple of times a month, when i want to figure out what i think about something. what changed? jobs? kids? did life accelerate somehow? was it the rise of the smart phone (who wants to type a whole blog post on that little keyboard)? or did facebook, instagram and twitter just kill our blogging vibe? but i realized that i miss that old sense of community. that's just not the same on facebook.

there is a kind of community on facebook and i have recently observed the intersection of one part of that community with actual, in-real-life community. watching it from afar has been at turns nauseating and heartwarming. i haven't really known how to feel about it. i've felt like a voyeur, since it was tangential to my own community, so it's felt like an invasion of privacy on my part to read the regular updates. but on the other hand, it was shared publicly, so i wasn't really spying. but it has felt like spying. and not only did i spy, i judged. at times harshly. there was a lot of god stuff and i have a hard time with that. but then, something softened in me. i can see people of all ages, from high school girls to grandparents, pouring out good thoughts of healing and support and honestly, it suddenly melted my heart. people demonstrably caring about other people, what's not to like? there's so much awfulness in the world right now, and i can't believe i almost missed this situation as an antidote to it. when i let myself, i can see that it's a genuine sense of community.

but at the same time, i can't bring myself to participate in it. so i sit across an ocean and voyeuristically read the posts, but don't contribute anything to the conversation. and there are a couple of reasons for that. one is the god thing - i cannot see how you can possibly praise god up and down for his mercy in the girl's recovery and not blame him that she fell ill in the first place - the logic just doesn't add up for me. the other is that i don't really know these people, tho' they are from my hometown, so i would feel like an intruder if i participated in the conversation. i have a classmate who i can see is part of the conversation and she's for all practical purposes, as far away as i am, but she feels she can contribute to the community in a way that i cannot. or will not. because i also admit that it's a choice on my part. she's just making a different choice than i am. and that's ok. it's perhaps a community i'm no longer part of, especially after my father died and with the decline of my mother and seeing how all the friends she had have fallen away as she has deteriorated. it's hard to keep a positive view of the place when it seems like it was all a facade and not real when the going gets tough.

i don't really know where it all leaves me, and i'm not done pondering it or looking for answers as to how to live this life we have landed in. a colleague recommended a russian philosopher that i had strangely not heard of before - p.d. ouspensky. i got his work from 1917 - in search of the miraculous - and i've been reading it today. perhaps it will provide me with a new way of viewing the world, even tho' the world in which he wrote was so far from our technology-flooded world today. but perhaps humans aren't all that different.

following and connecting

it seems that there are more and more ways of connecting with other people via one's beloved apple product and the miracle that is the internet. twitter, facebook, flickr, blogs, tumblr, but now also pinterest and instagram.  and now even etsy has this circles thing where you can see what those in your circle fave (it was about time on that one). but i have to say it all gets a bit muddy and confused. who am i following where? if people call themselves something different on one social media than on another, can i find them?

there are some sites that attempt to consolidate (hootsuite), but i find it clunky and it doesn't make me want to forget about going to the real site (like flickr stackr does on the iPad - i could never go to flickr again and be perfectly happy - at least for browsing - or tweetdeck, which is way better than the real interface for twitter). plus, hootsuite doesn't let me add everything i'd like to - like pinterest, tumblr, instagram, flickr. it really only consolidates twitter and facebook and linked-in and i'm not that interested in consolidating those. tho' there is a tiny overlap of audiences on those three, largely, i consider them different audiences and i don't want to broadcast the same status updates or photos on all three.

i've never really been that comfortable with the term followers - it has a messianic tone that i'm not that keen on. it also can (in the case of blogger after one is named blog of note) place an undue (and perhaps artificial and only in one's own head) pressure to lead. and to be honest, i'm blogging mostly for the sake of my sanity (tho' i do love that there are people reading and commenting on it, don't get me wrong), so i don't always want to have to post cheery, motivational, leaderly things. i'm mostly thinking out loud here.

i think we are moving towards the one set of followers world because more and more sites let you log in using your gmail or twitter or facebook account. i like that, because then i don't have to remember oodles of different log-ins and passwords. that said, it also feels a little bit like the borg are taking over and it's only a matter of time before we're assimilated into the giant hive mind that is the internet. that whole notion of assimilation grows increasingly touchy here in denmark what with our new "integration" minister wanting us all to assimilate (but that's the stuff of another post).

and what affect does all of this opportunity to social network have on the blogging world? i read recently a pessimistic piece on the future of the blog. it had actually appeared in the new york times, so it must be true, right? and i would say that i think the blogosphere has changed since i began blogging in earnest in 2008. a lot of the blogs that i followed back then are now dormant. a lot of the circle i interacted with has drifted away (thankfully not all of it) and i have drifted as well. i read less blogs and comment less, possibly because i'm busy browsing tumblr, which doesn't prompt comments in the same way, or pinning pretty things on pinterest. maybe my bloggy social circle has moved to flickr. and i'm getting the interaction i once got through blogging over there.

or maybe because blogs feels a bit more commercial and like they're trying to capture the attention of those who might award fabric lines or book contracts and less real, nitty gritty and personal these days. and on some instinctive level, i'm turned off by that. i think there is a place for commercial interests in blogging - i guess i love blogs where people share their handmade work and encourage you to visit their etsy shop - because i think there's still something honest and good about that kind of individual creative interest. but there's an awful lot of showing off going on out there.

however, i'm beginning to ramble and this is just the beginning of some thoughts on this whole thing that i've had tumbling in my head for awhile.

and if you want to find me any of the aforementioned places, just look for julochka. i'll probably be drooling over beautiful things on pinterest.

in which she rants about a bunch of annoying little things

if you're not in the mood for a rant, just look at the pretty sunrise and don't read any farther

i know i've been in an extraordinarily exuberant good mood of late and that it's probably getting on everyone's nerves, here in the dark, cold, grey depths of january. so lest you think it's all sunshine and roses in my life and moreover in my brain, i give you a few annoying things i've been thinking about...

~ WHAT is up with not using the word seamstress? all of the politically-correct supposedly hip sewing sites are referring to women who sew as sewists. why do this when seamstress is already a perfectly good word...laden with history and without negative connotation as far as my native speaker's ear can hear. i don't want to be referred to a sewist. pretentious gits.

~ why do the weirdest things stick in your mind at some stupid moment? case in point: the other day, we had guests and i was boiling water to make both coffee and tea. i made the coffee first and then needed to fill the kettle up for there to be enough water for the teapot. normal me would just top off the kettle from the tap and put it back on. but no, because there's a real brit standing there watching, some obscure warning i once read that you should only make tea by starting off with fresh, cold tap water in the kettle kicks into my head. and to the amazement of everyone watching, i poured out all that hot water and started over. and the brit wasn't even going to DRINK the tea, he was going to drink coffee!! bah!

~ i adore craft books and especially the sewing/quilting ones. today, for her birthday, sabin received the visually gorgeous sewing bits & pieces: 35 projects using fabric scraps by sandi henderson from my mom (mom likes to support our sewing habit). the book is lush and beautiful and thankfully sabin had to go to school, so i could sit down with it. the bright fabrics are just my idea of heaven, but then i got to the picnic quilt. it's a beautiful scalloped design. so far, not annoying, but here it comes...it's described as the most laid-back quilt that you can put together in an afternoon - intricately-cut scallop pieces, which you must cut with a scissors, not a rotary wheel and have to iron into a CURVE by making a special cardboard template and wrapping it in aluminum foil. and even then, you're not done, as you have to carefully lay it all out. one illustration even shows a good dozen pins holding one scallop in place. this is not an easy quilt, lady. so why say so? just to show off? because you're so much better than us? bah.

~ i'll probably be in trouble with the entire modern quilting community now for saying that...but seriously, people, someone's got to start saying something. we want need books that have good directions and good advice, and don't talk to down to us, not just pretty photos and showing off how skilled the quilter sewist seamstress writing it is.

~ you cannot use the kettle and the iron in this house at the same time. and even if you turn only one of them on, the lights visibly dim.

~ i hate my kitchen. the door under the sink, which you open frequently, since the trash is there, has a problem with the latch and will not shut properly. the kitchen is pepto-bismol pink and although i bought paint to cover that up, even husband (who has loads of energy and loves to paint) thinks it's not worth the energy to do that painting. and don't even get me started about the stove. one of those ridiculous glass-topped numbers. the only advantage of which is ease of wiping up. otherwise, whoever invented that shit should be taken out back and shot, along with the asshole who bought this one.

~ what the hell are those little "& nspb " things that get inserted into the HTML if you move a block of text from one spot to another? all they do is mess up your spacing!

~ my new obsession with kit lane's fabulous little felted creatures causes me to sit on her etsy shop and hit refresh. and sadly, it's still empty. :-(

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i hope that reassured everyone that i haven't become some ridiculous sap on the verge of homeschooling my now 10-year-old child...i must say that now i'm feeling much better and i'm headed back to the sewing machine.

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and on a totally un-ranty note, please check out the house tour of our wonderful old house over on rearranged design!