Monthly Archives: January 2011

face to facebook kicks my butt!

facebook friend number four winston chang was a freshman at west point in september of 2001.  when disaster struck, the campus was locked down and the stakes were suddenly very high–every student understood that they were being trained for a war.  winston ended up leaving the army after graduation and he is now building a career as a rap musician.  i met him when he performed in a play i wrote.*

all women, it is presumed, lie about their age and their weight.  here are the incontrovertible facts:  i’m fifty years old and yesterday morning i weighed 136.8 pounds.  i want to be staggeringly beautiful and strong enough to fend off age.

the workout winston devised relied on three elements:  lower body strength, upper body strength, and neural strength.  all of it in eight sets of three reps.  i was surprised that it was only a half hour, expecting to have to be locked into the gym for two hours.  it was followed by sprints in the parking lot.

winston has an alter ego mc kato and i will “meet” him on february first.  i have at least one other friend–steve quick slash stu fast–who has an alternate identity. i wonder how many people do that.

click on the word workout to see how winston devised a workout based on the master fitness class of west point!

*to see more about the play winston was in, go to http://perfectlylegalproductions.com

my first trip starts next friday!  i will meet my stepdaughter, my best friend from high school, a couple from kankakee, a bartender i’ve only met once, and my son joseph’s very good friend chris redmond!


face to facebook friendship requests

mike castagna came over to the house yesterday.  he saw the index card system i’ve devised to keep track of my face to facebook new year’s resolution.  he had one piece of advice:  do not accept any new facebook friendship requests.  but i couldn’t help myself.

darrell’s style shop in kearney, missouri is my newest friend–i wrote a history of kearney, missouri which is where jesse james was born and where he was buried.  and reburied.  and reburied again. . . . still, i’m sorry, mike–i want the free manicure/pedicure that i’m sure to get when i visit kearney!

so there are 327 facebook friends, mike being number three.  when i first joined facebook, i automatically confirmed every request because i assumed that the person knew me and i would be rude to refuse a hand held out in friendship.  like somewhere there’s a kindergarten teacher who’s prepared to lecture me that we don’t want people to feel left out!


mark zuckerberg and rena’s marriage: a face to facebook cautionary tale

i wake up to rena leonard every morning.  she sees me without makeup.  she knows exactly how i like my morning caffeine drip.  that’s more than i can say about anybody else amongst my friends.

rena works at the caribou three blocks from my house.  i pick up my coffee, i go lift weights, i come back home and turn on the computer.  so i can go several days in which i don’t really have any personal contact with anybody besides rena.  oh, and lisa from where i lift weights.

but i don’t know much about rena outside of seeing her at caribou. . . and being facebook friends with her.  so yesterday, we spent a few hours together.  she did my hair because she’s a hairdresser with her own salon in the city. there were some surprises–

43,869,800 people changed their relationship status to single during the year while 3,025,791 changed it to “it’s complicated.” Another 28,460,516 changed their status to in a relationship, 5,974,574 to engaged and 36,774,801 to married.  Rena doesn’t list herself as any of the above.

 

 

 


my first and favorite face to facebook friend*

eastman returns to oberlin.  he is my first and favorite facebook friend.  i bought him two cartons of marlboro reds and a lighter for christmas.

when i started using facebook, i sometimes went through his friends list to make sure there were no sexual predators stalking him.  after he hit a thousand friends this became impossible.  i am not allowed to post on his page even when i see him tagged doing odd things.  like being passed out on someone’s sofa with a bottle in his hand.

now i will totally mortify him. . .

*tied with joseph, his brother.  there are five great loves of my life and joseph and eastman are two of them.

here is the third try–i am not very good at making videos. . .

next up:  rena tortures my hair!!!! and she blames mark zuckerberg for the demise of her marriage. . .


face to facebook methodology

the index cards are piling up. each card represents a friend and each stack of cards represents a road trip.

but while index cards are low tech, there’s an aspect of this that has been intimidating: buying a flip camera at best buy, figuring out how to upload and download things. i have so much to learn!

and one of the things i learned is that i’m not really friends with elmore leonard. i thought i was but his facebook page is administered by his research assistant greg sutter. does that mean i’m really friends with greg sutter?


face to facebook challenge 324 friends plus one

this morning i received a facebook request from julianne couch who lives in laramie, wyoming.  she is friends with the inimitable and quite dead Mr. Clark (don’t tell him he’s dead, it just makes him fret).  in any event, i asked her if she understood that i’d have to meet her this year if we became friends.  she agreed and allowed as how she might be moving to iowa to make seeing her easier.  what a sweetheart!

this week–

1.  working out with winston chang–this west point grad is show this old lady how to make good on the new year’s resolutions (those five pounds) that i’ve never managed when they were really my resolutions.

2.  my hair done by rena leonard.  she’s a barista at caribou and i get my coffee there every morning. . . but i’ve never spent any time with her at all.

3.  running with lisa jarvis.  i see her every morning at the winnetka community house fitness center.  but maybe we should really be friends.

and i’m mapping out the grand midwestern tour. . . . i leave in a week and a half.  what happens if i don’t recognize people because i haven’t seen them in so long?  i think i have to develop a nice, vague pretense of being farsighted.


face to facebook new year’s resolution–

in order to make good on the new year’s resolution to have an in person interaction with every one of my facebook friends, i have to learn to use (sigh!) more technology–so i made and posted my first ever video to facebook.  so far, nobody has defriended me.  i actually have been rather frightened of that.  


the face to facebook project is underway!

it’s january first and i have just 365 days to meet 324 friends!  i sure hope reggie gholston does not get redeployed to baghdad!  i hope i can get over my natural aversion to aeroflot airlines!

 

step one:  index cards.  i’m a big believer in them.  i’ve been going through my friends and each friend gets an index card.  i’m trying to organize them by geography so i can consolidate.  some surprises:  jeffrey cokefair has apparently disappeared off the face of the earth and steve ware has moved to brooklyn.  also, i’m friends with two newspapers–the winnetka current and the winnetka talk–as well as phototronics*.  i’m not sure how to have some quality time with those last three friends.

step two:  set up an itinerary!  i already have a grand midwestern tour in mind.  a stepdaughter, a bartender, my son joseph’s best friend from high school, a guy who writes operas, my best friend from high school and his wife, and a curious couple from kankakee.  it will take three days minimum for the road trip.  one of the reasons why i think this project is good for me is that i’m agoraphobic.  i don’t like to leave the house and can sometimes go for days without actually talking or interacting in an “actual” way with anyone.  i can sometimes go several weeks without actually crossing the borders of my town.  i wonder if facebook allows agoraphobics to give in to their natural impulses but at the same time think of themselves as very social.  it’s certainly done that for me!

 

*facebook told me that phototronics is having a birthday today.  i wonder if i’m supposed to send an e-card to a photo processing store!