last year, i made a resolution to visit my facebook friends. i managed two hundred and ninety two visits, circumnavigating the globe with my son joseph, learned about my friends and their lives outside of the facebook page. i picked up a few travel tips along the way. . . as i head back out onto the road!
Monthly Archives: February 2012
so this is taking the unfriending thing a little too far. . . a story about murder.
sixty year old marvin potter of johnson county, tennessee has been charged with the murder of billy payne, jr., 36, and his 23 year old girlfriend billy jean hayworth. the couple were shot to death in their mountain city home, although (thank goodness!) their eight month old baby was found unhurt in his dead mother’s arms.
potter’s thirty year old daughter jennelle potter was un-friended by payne and hayworth after what the couple described as jennelle harassing them on facebook (and sometimes on phone). jennelle’s sometimes boyfriend jamie lynn curd (who is second cousin to billy payne) was charged with helping marvin potter. jennelle is probably going to be charged as well and guess where the police are looking for their evidence? yep, facebook. . . .
marvin potter and jamie curd in court. if they use the defense of "justifiable homicide" i think i have to review everybody i've ever unfriended. including that creepy guy who kept sending me pictures of himself. like, those kind of pictures of himself.
wow! unfriending gets you murdered? well, it reminds me of something that happened to me earlier this year. i was unfriended and blocked by a facebook friend who read my post about yoga. she was pretty upset with me and felt that i had disrespected her “sacred” place–namely, the yoga studio that she attends. she also defriended two of my other facebook friends on the same day. don’t worry–i have no interest in getting out a shotgun. in fact, i want to apologize to her but i’m a little uncertain how to do it or what i’m apologizing for. also, the tone of the email she sent me was pretty unequivocal and expressly told me to not respond.
i think if you read my blog often enough or if you know me personally, you know i have trouble with the grape. if i feel rejected, dejected, depressed, compressed, i'll reach for that white wine. i was really surprised i was able to resist. although i spent the entire next day in bed and was awfully sick.
i’m not sure how to send a note of apology and, oddly, her email went to my inbox while i was in the air coming back from having seen her. we hugged and kissed as we parted. i even mailed off a “thank you for having me” note before i opened up my email inbox. and i got very “wha. . . ?” emails from the two other ladies who were unfriended as well.
i try to be real careful about how i blog about people's religious beliefs. and i try to keep an open mind in real life. on the other hand, i have a tendency to make fun of EVERYTHING! and i need to be more careful. i recognize the usual isms--christianity, judaism, islam, hinduism, buddhism.
the odd thing is that i had been a skeptic about yoga. now i’m not so sure–i found one class made me stronger, calmer, and i even did a backbend (at fifty one this is no small accomplishment).
deactivating — the time out from facebook
Hey there my close family and friends!
I have decided to unplug from all social networks, such as FB, yahoo email and cell phone. This experience will not only help my current relationships grow stronger but it will make one heck of a paper to write about for my school. So if you want to get a hold of me for the next 90 days (May 1st) You can call my home number which is xxx-xxx-xxxx, stop by my house or send me a letter (which I would love!, even if it is just to tell me how crazy I am)
I love all of you and I hope I hear from most, if not all of you in these next 90 days!
Love you!
when i saw the above message in my facebook message box i was taken aback.
no facebook? no cell phone? no twitter? argh!!!!!!!!!
deactivating a facebook account means that you effectively disappear from facebook. but you can reactivate the account at any time. maybe you just want a break. maybe you want to focus your efforts on real relationships. maybe you want to get some work done. facebook will send you a manipulative message asking if you really want to deactivate your account because everybody will miss you, but hey, it’s your choice. . . .
people cannot find you on facebook and your skin and hair turns ghostly white. you don't have eyes or a nose or a mouth. and you have a cowlick. it's spooky!
my son and his girlfriend both deactivated their account when they broke up so that their mutual friends could not gossip on facebook about them. two weeks later, both were back on facebook. facebook reactivation gives you back all your information, profile pics, the messages, the status updates unchanged. deleting an account is a little more dire–then you disappear and if you decide you want to go back to facebook, you have to start all over. facebook claims it retains all account information for fourteen days, kind of a cooling off period in case you reconsider.
i’m going to be very interested in what happens to my friend and whether she returns to facebook before may one. there has been considerable dissatisfaction with facebook’s changing privacy standards and format, but facebook’s growth in terms of users suggests that any trend towards deletion of accounts isn’t happening. which makes me wonder. . .
it’s time for me to willie nelson!
i have been lazy enough. well, not so lazy, but not so much on the road. last year's resolution was to meet every one of my 325 facebook friends. i now have more friends and i'm not sure how i'm going to meet them all!
i’m starting to organize a general itinerary but it’s difficult because now i have 4,400 friends and i think some of them i will have to group into geographic zones. this isn’t much different from what i did at the beginning of last year when i thought about dividing the world into 325 specific friends. i thought about who lived near whom and who was friends with another and when anybody would be expected to go on vacation to visit. . .
this is someone i’m seeing this coming week. . .
this is the profile picture of the friend i will see next thursday. i see a resemblance to lionel richie. anyone?
so i pull the car out of the garage and head west. . . as willie nelson says “on the road again, the life i love is making music with my friends and i can’t wait to get on the road again. . .
add a few new members to the 1% club and make sure to log out every once in a while!
there are a few new members to the 1% club as facebook announces an initial public offering.
a lot of the fire in the occupy movement centers around the 1% of americans who make a whole lot of dough but--according to occupiers--don't pay their fair share of taxes. there will be many new millionaires created by facebook's offering, people who either work for the company or were early investors.
mark zuckerberg, the c.e.o. and inventor of facebook, owns 533.8 million shares and stands to be worth $28.3 billion if the valuation of the company at $100 billion is correct.
the winklevoss twins were mark's classmates at harvard and they had some ideas they shared with him that could be considered the facebook concept. uh, that's about as much as my lawyer said i could say. go rent the movie "the social network" or "mean girls" if you want to get a better idea of the whole story. really, either movie would work.
i like the fact that zuckerberg is going to be a billionaire, especially because i know he’ll pay his “fair share” of taxes but because he’s created a product that helps me keep in touch with my friend. but i know we have to be careful, because it’s important to log out every once in a while and have real interactions with our friends — logging out is the toughest click!
mark zuckerberg needs a fly haircut and some new clothes but i guess with his money he'll be able to do all that.
mark zuckerberg has said something that i’ve always hoped is true for him: “we don’t build services to make money, we make money to build better service.”
aim high — in this case 52 stories!
so i went to a yoga class at south boston yoga studio with my facebook friend mary mcmanus. last year, she was friend number 168, meaning she was the one hundred and sixty eighth person i saw in 2011. she took me on a tour of my older son joseph’s campus–in all four years he attended boston university, i had not once flown out to see him. bad mother? maybe. but it was because i was afraid. afraid of travel, afraid of flying, afraid of everything. meeting all your facebook friends all over the world puts a dent in the fear of flying thing.
in any event, i told mary that my new year’s resolution for 2012 is to pay forward the encouragement, love and support shown to me by my facebook friends, mary most particularly. she was my cheerleader. she was always one for a good word of encouragement. i wanted to give that to others and i told her i was coming into boston to meet two new facebook friends who have trouble with panic attacks and fear. mary and her husband tom invited me to stay with them. i went out for a three hour lunch with mary the moment i arrived. i felt so loved and so happy. we went to the yoga class in part because mary is devoted to yoga but also because i wanted to see for myself whether it had the anti-anxiety effects mary promised.
it sure did. my acid reflux was gone. for the first time in weeks, i didn’t have that horrible sword in chest feeling. i’m not one for organized exercise classes, never gone in for chanting, but this was the goods! then mary and i went to meet mary tabbi-fuller and her sister in law angela lopresti. i was a little concerned about mary because she had spent the weekend in the hospital, suffering from an episode of low blood sugar. i hoped it wasn’t brought on by anxiety.
the four of us ate lunch and mary had prepared a list of resources for angela and lisa to consider. boston area doctors and therapists and, of course, the south boston yoga studio. and then it was time to try. . .
there are many ways to overcome generalized panic and anxiety — but one that i really appreciate is conquering one thing and then taking that “wow, i did it!” feeling and applying it to other situations. lisa and angela both were afraid of elevators but most particularly of heights. lisa, a phlebotomist, felt that some of her anxiety had led her to calling in sick more than was acceptable and she needed to get a grip on her fear. we chose the fifty second story of the prudential center. . .
i was so happy walking into the light with mary, lisa and angela!
angela, mary, me, and lisa at the top of the hub in boston! notice we're not scared to sit by the window, which isn't something i could have predicted!
today think of something you’re afraid of that you think most people are not. i’m not talking about playing with an anaconda. i am talking about having a conversation with the barista at your coffee joint, riding the Ferris wheel with your kids, speaking up for yourself at tomorrow’s sales meeting, forgiving a friend and letting them back into your life.
yogini for a day!
i think of yoga as ridiculous. chanting. poses. incense. overpriced spandex outfits. but i went to yoga because my facebook friend from last year’s journey asked me to give it a try. . .
can you have a yoga studio without a picture or statue of ganesh and maybe a few posters with inspirational phrases? jeez, i like my exercise to be short, nasty and brutish–just like thomas hobbes, the seventeenth century english philosopher promised me all life would be!
f2fb friend #168 mary mcmanus insisted that before we saw f2fb friends #295 lisa tabbi-fuller and her sister in law f2fb friend #297 angela lopresti* we had to try a yoga class. she was convinced that south boston yoga studio was the place to go. argh! but since i was staying over at the home of tom and mary in order to save hotel money, i couldn’t very well refuse.
seriously, the teacher david vendetti didn’t look like this when he was playing the harmonium!
there’s chanting, incense, a statue of ganesh, the de rigeur spandex, and a teacher david vendetti who plays the harmonium. he sang an indian song interwoven with melody and lyrics from aerosmith’s dream on. i decided that dante had dropped me into a special heretofore unknown circle of hell. my arms were burning, my legs contorted into positions that i could hardly remember from being a kid.
but then i sort of got into it. i was awful at some poses. and occasionally i was balancing on one foot and thought i would fall over on the impossibly serious yoga gal on my right. a few times i thought the teacher was making fun of me, but hell, i wasn’t the model student. then after an hour and a half i was as exhausted as i would have been had i been running and i realized that for about forty five minutes i had been completely out of my head, whcih is to say, i was in the moment. i wasn’t thinking the drama stuff, i wasn’t part of myself, i was just part of the class. that’s so cool.
i talked to david vendetti about whether yoga is helpful for people with anxiety–whether social phobias, agoraphobia, panic attacks)–and here’s what he had to say:
deal with your anxiety.
i’m not a convert. i’m not going to be buying any incense. i won’t be talking to my friends about their chakras and past lives. but there was one odd thing that happened–for the first time in several years, i didn’t have acid reflux. i didn’t have that pain in the chest i get when i eat or when i’m anxious. coincidence? i don’t know. i’m with an open mind. i felt okay. maybe i should consider this as part of the arsenal against anxiety.
and in fact, i was pretty laid back. me–laid back?
and i’d have to be laid back because i was about to take not one but two facebook friends up to the top of the prudential center in boston so we could talk woman to fear about heights and elevators.
i’m not necessarily going to give yoga another try, especially since the south boston yoga studio is, well, actually quite a distance from my home in chicago. but you can have one free lesson (tell them arlynn sent you!) just go to http://www.southbostonyoga.net/ or to their address, 36 w. broadway, or call them at 617/315-7448
*i’ve decided to go back to the 2011 numbering system. just easier for me. so marshae white of lorain, ohio becomes #293, molly parshall of coldwater, michigan becomes #294, lisa tabbi-fuller becomes #295 and her sister in law angela becomes #296. the f2fb project is back after a much needed hiatus! now i just have to figure out how to answer all my messages and emails. i fall further and further behind. .. .
but in boston i was focused on two galpals who have anxiety attacks that debilitate and i was wondering whether yoga could help them. . . .
arlynnpresser 