on my birthday, i received from my son joseph (facebook friend 61) a somewhat mystifying series of packages. two maps, one of the world and another of the united states. and a package of pushpins. the accompanying note made the usual references to candles, wishes, years, many more, etc. and then “you know what to do with this”. . . which i thought i did. i unrolled both maps, took out the datebooks from 2011 and from this year.
before i made the new year’s resolution to meet all my facebook friends and connect/reconnect in person, i was riddled with anxiety about leaving my house or leaving the little village of winnetka. i still am. i have used cars, trains, planes, buses to see my friends–but never a pony. maybe i need a pink one!
my first trips were within illinois or to neighboring states of indiana, michigan, wisconsin, iowa and missouri. i had eight friends in kearney, missouri. still do! each trip i tried to be efficient–sort of like going to the dry cleaner on the way to the grocery store and stopping at the gas station on the way back.
sometimes people who are solitary, shy, housebound for whatever reason can use facebook and other social networking sites to keep in touch with their friends and family. in my case, i used facebook as a substitute for being with my friends and family.
on thursday, october 13, 2011 i flew from chicago to anchorage and drove southwest to the tip of the kenai peninsula to meet facebook friend 233 christy russ. we drank elderberry wine and ate fish that came from the harbor. the next morning caught a flight from anchorage to kotzebue and beyond to meet facebook friend 234 ian coglan in nome. i was amazed at how many bars and tanning salons that town has. by eight a.m. sunday morning i was back in chicago. it’s hard to remember that this state is four times as big as texas!
i finished with the pushpins and asked joseph what he meant. he said “you need to write a book about this and you need to do it now.” i said yes, i will. i’d like to. he said, “no, mom, i am serious. you need to get started.” i said yes, i will. he said, “i mean it, stop traveling for a bit and write this.” i said i’m worried about whether i can find a publisher. he said “you need to just stop thinking and worrying and just do it.” i asked where did you learn to nag like this? and he said “from you, of course.”
the best way to make a resolution to do something is to tell your friends and family and ask them to make you accountable. whether it’s losing weight, stopping the love affair with the nicotine sticks or the bottle, or meeting every facebook friend. so i am asking you–will you help make me accountable?
christmas, valentine’s day, mother’s day, my birthday. the four dread horsemen of the calendar. from a distance, wonderful and appealing. the moment of impact? horrific. well, maybe not the moment of impact. it’s the night before. i always think i will be forgotten by those i love. and everyone else. and i’ve had those years.
i was put up for adoption by my parents when i was three years old. after twenty two years, i used a private detective to track down my natural/biological parents justin and aleta. today there’s open adoptions. there’s tracking your parents down on facebook. or maury povich.
when the future queen of france was sent from austria to meet her husband the future louis the xvi, at the border she was required to change her name from maria antonia to marie antoinette and to strip naked and re-dress in clothes provided by the french. she also had to give up her dog and her ladies in waiting. in 1963 when i was adopted, my name was changed from arlynn merrill leiber to lynn melody patrick, i took no clothes with me from my old home, and i gave up my stuffed kitten. i did not get jewelry and versailles. on the other hand, i didn’t get beheaded. go see farewell my quee. after all, it’s been three long years since a marie antoinette movie has been playing in theaters!
i thought i had a good (or at least okay) relationship with these new/old parents and it surprised me that both forgot my birthday the first year we were in contact. i would like to say that i didn’t mind that justin and aleta didn’t remember. but i did. i howled and whined. i was a petty, sniveling, blotchy faced wreck. but in private. a few days later, justin reminded me that my infant half sister casey’s birthday was coming up and i said it was interesting that we shared the same astrological sign. a dozen roses showed up the next morning with a belated birthday greeting. as for my mother aleta, the matter resurfaced in october. she called me in a fury. i had forgotten her birthday.
“but you never told me when your birthday was!” i wailed. “and besides, you forgot mine!”
“how was i supposed to know yours?” aleta countered.
“because you were there!”
as you can imagine, this interaction didn’t help our relationship. i think i hold aleta responsible for my adoption although since aleta and justin were married it must have been a joint decision at some level. i know if my ex-husband had ever asked me to put up joseph or eastman for adoption, i would have balked. not that he ever would have. eight years after this conversation, aleta terminated our relationship over an issue involving my payment of her health insurance. justin and i have our ups and downs–and some years he remembers my birthday and some years he doesn’t.
on july 22 every year i have a massive anxiety attack slash pity party. this year was no exception. it started at five o’clock with the shakes and chest pain. it ramped up with crying and shaking. i was utterly and completely convinced that i was forgotten, alone, without purpose, and about to die. it would be months before anybody would notice my demise.
how does santa know where you are if you’ve sold your house? this past month, a new family moved in and i haven’t got my bearings. it would be massively worse if santa were to die! but that won’t happen because as long as there are children and retail establishments who believe in him he will live!
and then something odd happened. a facebook friend posted a picture of a birthday cake on my profile page. another posted a link to a recording of mickey mouse singing happy birthday. then a link to youtube showed up, and it was my friend jose’s youtube post for my day — you can watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VluSLAGdwY&feature=youtu.be
and there were messages and pokes and comments and postings. and i started to write thank you’s. and more thank you’s. i rifled through an album of fifty two pictures created by my friend nit, whom i had traveled to visit in las vegas — the messages embedded within the pictures are really wonderful and there’s one for every year of my life. https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.2284501568258.62614.1720445328&type=3&l=5d25bd20fa
i even received a birthday greeting from mark zuckerberg, the founder of facebook. he’s pictured here with tony tyner, mr. 314, meaning that tony is the 314th facebook friend i have met. hey, many thanks mark and tony! btw, married life must be treating you nicely, mark, because you look like you’ve put on a few pounds!
i needed to say thank you to each person and that took me most of my birthday but it was a wonderful way to notice, remember, reconnect with each friend. because even if facebook automatically puts a notification on your page reminding you of which friends are having birthdays, it still takes thought and care to write out a greeting or post a picture or photoshop an image just for me!
i realized that i had cried because i thought i was forgotten and i sure as heck wasn’t. in fact, all told, i wrote eleven hundred notes of thanks yesterday and today and i’m still behind. sending each thank you changed my perspective, and turned me around.
thank you facebook!
and also thank you to facebook for an interesting feature: every time a friend posts on your wall, your mutual friends are notified. so, for instance, when my son eastman’s friend will (who was the 176th facebook friend i met with) sent me a “happy birthday mrs. presser” eastman would have been informed. and in a remarkable coincidence eastman called me about twenty minutes after will’s message. he says he’s sent me a package but that it won’t get to me for a few days.
i don’t know where eastman sent this package but i figure if santa can keep track of every little child, eastman can certainly find his mom. i just hope santa or a package shows up at the daughters of the american revolution meeting where i’ve been invited to speak on thursday evening. oh, but i forget that santa won’t be available–he’s in tahiti because this is his off season!
meanwhile, my other son joseph (the sixty first facebook friend) sent me a present that will change my life. i will assemble it today!
without pictures of cute puppies and kittens, most social networking sites would collapse.*
one exception, of course, is linkedin because these guys are, like, serious. about their networking. i have a linkedin account but i never use it because i get intimidated. also, there is no reason anybody should want to network with me because i can’t even get myself a job, much less find one for someone else!
some of my facebook friends are cats and dogs and i am particularly close to my facebook friends PB and Joe Kral, who were the 250th and 251st facebook friends i met with. pb had read an article about me and reached out because she thought i might enjoy being friends with her dog joe. pb and her husband own five dogs. only joe has a facebook account and he has over thirteen hundred friends. some of them are dogs and some of them are, like me, people. joe’s dog friends include skeeter sez, chubbyhugs wallace, stewie dadane, and chester hoover. all of these dogs are friends or followers of nigel buggers, a dog who is the self-described chief hound of “life with dogs” —
every year, the dogs in joe’s circle of friends send their “moms” to a facebook party. this year the party was held at the kral home in lake forest, illinois. guests came from as far away as england and i was particularly happy to finally meet chester hoover’s mom. chester is my facebook friend. so is chester’s mom, michelle statler who is the 325th facebook friend i have met since i made a new year’s resolution at the beginning of 2011 to meet all my facebook friends as well as andrea joffe (326) who came all the way from cincinnati, ohio. . . something makes me think i’m going to see her again when i make my next visit to my son eastman (facebook friend number one) at oberlin college.
*one of the great pleasures of my day is reading the blogpost of my friend pink ninjabi–she employs cute kitten pictures to make insightful and witty and fun observations about being a canadian chinese convert to islam. go check it out at pinkninabi.com!
in vegas, with my facebook friend chaperones reggie and vince, we planned on meeting up with facebook friend niteen joshilkar. i was very interested in meeting him because he has done me the most important favor in this facebook project. when he noticed that i was receiving so many friendship requests that i was teetering on the edge of 5,000, he created a “public profile” page where people who want to keep track of my adventures can subscribe and send me messages. i was grateful. but also i think niteen is wonderful.
alas, niteen was in florida stuck in meetings and missed his flight. so i had some time to kill in vegas. i asked only one thing:
alas, we left the next day without any new shoes and with niteen having never gotten back to his home in vegas. but with all the poker, the free champagne, the food, the dazzling showgirls, i think the most fun was going to the monet exhibit at the bellagio hotel.
at lax airport, i asked vince and reggie for their postal addresses. i wanted to send them thank you notes for their valor and courage in being my chaperones. because no matter how close you feel to a person you correspond with on facebook, myspace, linkedin, etc., you should allow for safety first.
easy enough to send vince p. a thank you note but reggie is being shipped out to afghanistan in two weeks. so for the moment, he doesn’t have a fixed address. . . just like me. so instead, i have to say it here: thank you reggie! i asked him what he wanted in care packages and he replied toilet paper and food. lots of food. will do, captain!
i’m terribly sad that i missed meeting niteen joshilkar. but flight has delays, cancellations, booking problems, hassles. and so i will wait and try again. meanwhile, i look forward to turning fifty two and thinking i am part of a wonderful adventure–life!
facebook was originally a term given to the student directories that certain schools gave out to make remembering the name of the cute dude in calculus easier. harvard, where mark zuckerberg attended, didn’t have a facebook but several of the fraternities and sororities had their own individual facebooks.
mark had a little fun by hacking into the databases for these facebooks and creating “facemash” — an online game of “hot or not” in which players rated side by side pictures of their classmates. the game attracted 450 players and 22,000 views in the first four hours. mark got into some trouble and was nearly expelled but then he decided that “facemash” had tapped into some primal needs for connection and for looking at cute potentials. facemash didn’t ask players to rate pictures of adorable kittens, inspirational thoughts, or team logos–all of which have been or are presently used by some of my facebook friends!
mark played around with other similar applications, eventually hitting on what we now use as facebook. facebook sometimes makes us believe we have a rich and varied social life when we really haven’t even gotten out of bed all day. and facebook sometimes brings people together who wouldn’t normally interact. one of the surprises of my new years resolution to meet my facebook friends was discovering how different and yet how similar i am to my friends.
this past week i went to los angeles with two chaperones reggie gholston and vincent peters. i sometimes take chaperones because it’s a good safety measure.
i also took these chaperones because reggie (on the left) is being deployed to afghanistan in a few weeks. he will be gone for a year and my “care” packages will include smokes, toilet paper, and food. both vince and reggie are my facebook friends, but they are more than that. they are my buddies.
one of the facebook friends i wanted to meet was #324 brandon day. he is a twentysomething genius who ran into a bit of trouble a few years ago when he experienced full on agoraphobia. it was difficult for him to explain to his family and friends what he was going through–panic attacks that made it impossible for him to get beyond the front door. i think with facebook people can connect and relate their common experiences and they don’t feel so alone or so weird.
and that’s an even more important application of mark zuckerberg’s genius than offering the world the opportunity to rate their fellow humans hot or not.
brandon’s genius is in the creation of phone apps, video games and whatnot. through the magic of facebook i am friends with sarah, whom i visited in detroit. she is agoraphobic. and she wants very much to create video games, which she oughta be real good at because video games is how she gets through her day. i introduced the two of them via facebook and when i met brandon we had a message for her.
brandon is working on a phone application and website to help agoraphobics like sarah and our fondest wish is that the three of us will be together for lunch in los angeles, detroit, chicago, london, paris, rome?
meanwhile, on the other coast, last night i received a message from facebook friend michele piersiak. she lives in staten island and has had trouble leaving the house for a year. i visited her and she felt i was “safe” to walk around the neighborhood with. we talked about major goals–hers is to become a psychologist who helps people with social anxieties. and then we talked about minor goals. i think of minor goals as the things that may sound silly to other people but they are building blocks for your major goal. michele’s is to have dinner at laconde verde, a restaurant in manhattan owned by robert deniro. there are reservations under my name for august ninth! in order to do that, she has had to make mini-goals of walking around her neighborhood on her own, going to shops and stores, using public transportation. just yesterday, she readied herself for the laconde verde lunch by going to lunch with facebook pal carolyn quinn. facebook matchmaking.
you can play hot or not on facebook, but i think facebook and other social networking sites have a lot more to offer. or maybe i am just worried i’d get a “not”!
after saying goodbye to brandon, the chaperones and i headed for las vegas where we would ultimately end up with friendship tragedy. still, if our adventure could be a moviemash it would be “driving miss daisie” and “the hangover”. . .
los angeles is a place of great beauty and i’m not talking about the topanga mountains, the pacific ocean glittering at its feet, or the sun that slips into the western horizon without asking anybody to say “thank you” for its warmth. no, no, EVERYBODY in los angeles is a great beauty and what do great beauties require? a stylist, a designer, and some screentime.
my two chaperones reggie joe and vince p. are my facebook friends. reggie is being deployed to afghanistan in a few weeks and my fondest wish is that he use this trip to make the acquaintance of beautiful women. and that vince will drive him.
i walked out onto the sidewalk this morning–it was empty because sidewalks are a recent invention and los angelenos are rightfully cautious of them. everyone lives in their cars, preferring to park them in the middle of one of the many fourteen lane highways and freeways that criss cross the city. nonetheless, there was a real sidewalk outside the hotel and rather than drive the rental car across the street to the starbucks, i thought i would rough it. the valet at the hotel was concerned.
there were screens everywhere. advertisements and commercials and previews for upcoming movies on the sides of buildings. i watched them and thought that i would never have to buy a television if i lived here. i’d just have to look up to the sky. i noticed that vince and reggie can’t sleep unless the television is on. without the sound. is this some sort of culture shift? or am i just sleep deprived?
f2fb friend #323 jackie byrdsong is a natural ageless beauty who claims to have no stylist, no designer, just her own sense of what to do, what to wear, what is for her and what will not work. i adored meeting her finally. her daughter and i share some phobias and we talked about how to overcome them.
vince p. and reggie brought with them a sunglasses designer stevie boi. stevie and i can’t be facebook friends because stevie is a public person with over three thousand people following or “liking” him. he tweets a lot and instagrams and does all sorts of things that make me feel that having a facebook account is a bit passe. nonetheless, he is fashion forward. he explained to me that his sunglasses have appeared over 25 times in vogue magazine.
sunglasses by stevie boi. can i pull off this look?
vince, reggie, stevie and i spent the rest of the afternoon meeting with stylists, designers, and people who “pull” clothes for celebrities. you think kim kardashian just wakes up every morning looking like that? but i got stevie boi to give me some fashion advice i can take on the road with me!
tomorrow, las vegas which i understand to be a sleepy, rural enclave where people are a lot more “real” and “down to earth”. . . i’ll feel much more at home.
i’m grateful for planes. don’t get me wrong. i started off this morning in chicago, darted over to detroit and picked up a flight to los angeles so i can visit with facebook friends.
i thought my flight was at two o’clock. so i had a leisurely morning of working out and scoping out tmz.com then i looked at the ticket and figured out that the first flight of the day would arrive in detroit at two o’clock. i needed to be at o’hare at NOON. what a delightful sprint to the airport. followed by a sprint from one terminal to another in detroit’s airport! i think i left the coffee maker on in my ex-husband’s apartment! he’s in montana, i’m in los angeles and the coffeemaker is in chicago. i have a feeling i might not be invited to use the apartment again!
my panic attack started as i boarded the flight from detroit to los angeles. the plane was cramped that a flight attendant started using my head as a elbow rest as he stowed luggage. the lady in the seat next to me fell asleep with her head on my shoulder. the flight attendant stepped on my foot three times. the guy in the seat behind me was quite pretezel-like and managed some stretching exercises that involved him raising his hands in the air and then back so far that if i had given him a tube of mascara he could have done my makeup!
i started shaking. crying. thinking about that coffeemaker and the entire building burning down. all the apology notes i’d have to write. i took two ativan and tried to concentrate on an episode of “how i met your mother” on the overhead screen.
and then something curious happened. the flight attendant, for whom i had no good feelings, had relocated a passenger in the row across from me to the back of the plane. and the attendant sat down next to the remaining seated passenger. it took a moment to realize what i was looking at–a flight attendant trying to calm someone in the midst of a panic attack. i wasn’t the only one having trouble.
the flight is over, i’m on the ground in los angeles. if you’re in chicago, you might notice a curious burnt coffee smell wafting out of the streeterville neighborhood. i get ready to meet a facebook friend tomorrow. and i have decided it’s okay to have panic attacks on planes. because that’s what airplanes do!
in my little quest to meet every facebook friend i have, i sometimes come across friends who share my secret: agoraphobia. fear of the marketplace is the translation from Greek, but really, it’s fear of everything.
in the 1939 movie the wizard of oz, bert lahr played the cowardly lion, afraid of everything! sometimes i feel like the lion!
one of the things i will be doing in los angeles is meeting with my facebook friend brandon spellman day. he is a video game slash computer slash programming genius and he has experienced his own moments of being a cowardly lion. he is over that period in his life and he wants to help others who are in the thick of that fear.
he is creating a phone app that will allow agoraphobics to chart, monitor and encourage themselves to shove past boundaries. brandon is kind enough to have me help him with it and the los angeles trip is an opportunity for us to complete that project!
yesterday i had lunch with facebook friends bonnie, tony and charles. charles is presently struggling with agoraphobia. and he’s promised to test drive the phone app.
what about you? would you find an app like this helpful?
i look forward to meeting my facebook friend brandon!
when i started my facebook friendship journey, it was january 2011 and i had 325 friends. i figured it was a long distance run with a timer set at exactly one year. i didn’t meet every single friend, but i got the asian f.
on the third episode of season three of the hit series glee, mike chang’s father demands mike be drug tested and drop out of the glee club because he has received an a minus on a test. mike and the other kids referred to the ninety percent grade as an “asian f”. one could say i got the asian f, because ten percent of my facebook friends didn’t get a visit from me. i was surprised to find out i was friends with spambots, dead people, prison inmates, and some friends who maybe just didn’t like me enough to make a facebook friendship a face to face friendship!
this past weekend, reveling in my newly minted homelessness, i visited rock island, illinois to see my facebook friends #27 eric fields and #9 heather tyler. i don’t really think of my friends as being numbers but i found it was easier for me to keep track of what i was doing by giving a friend a number based on when i saw them. my first facebook friend was my son eastman. heather was the ninth person i visited last year. eric was the twenty seventh.
sometimes when you have a goal that is really important to you and really big, it helps to divide it into smaller chunks and keep track of the small successes as they pile up. many times i would look at the “number” of the friend i had just visited and look at the day of the year and i would think “i’m doing okay” which is a pretty good feeling to have!
eric and heather are married and live with eric’s family in rock island. recently, they have experienced an economic reversal: they need a place to live and some work. if you live in or around rock island, illinois, do you have any ideas for them?
after visiting with eric and heather, i went east to see my facebook friend #322 charles henry. charles became my friend after january 1, 2011. i got a lot of new facebook friends but i stayed focused during the year on the “original” 325 friends.
you might ask yourself why i would think it was so important to meet my facebook friends. well, sure, there’s the inte-ma-lectual inquiry into the nature of social media and networking systems in the early twenty first century. . . but there’s also this: i was a fifty year old empty nester with no reason to open the front door except to welcome the pizza delivery guy. i was scared to leave the house and i consoled myself with the delusion that i engaged in the world and had an active social life because, hell, i had 325 friends on facebook. and when i left the house i got crushing panic attacks. absolutely convinced i’m having a heart attack. terrified of the world. ready to cry and scream. i still do that all the time, but i am learning to just keep driving.
charles shares some of my problems: he has panic attacks when he leaves his “safe” area which is a radius of about two miles outside of his home. he has panic attacks when he has to wait out a red light. he went through a period of being housebound when he was younger and then, after many years of feeling great, he again struggles. he has been unemployed and he is working through a divorce. one would think meeting him would be a downer. one would be wrong.
facebook friend #315 tony tyner, #71 bonnie bradlee, me and #322 charles henry met at charles’ home. we had a lot of fun and next month, charles will pick out a restaurant outside of his safe area and we’re going to do this again! oddly, on august ninth i’ll be having lunch in a manhattan restaurant with a facebook friend who is housebound in staten island. she has been opening up her boundaries a lot in preparation!
one of the many things we talked about was faith and our respective relationships with God. although we four have differences, we agreed that the best prayer begins with “thank you for. . . ”
last year i visited 292 of my then 325 facebook friends. i went to thirteen countries, the four tips of the united states. i visited a strip club in cincinnati because my facebook friend owned it. i went hiking in the topanga mountains because a facebook friend persuaded me that the mountain lion warnings were just for show. i had dinner in a home in calabassas that is in the same gated community that has within it a gated community that britney spears lives in! i went fishing, golfing, to a casino, to dinner at everything from the chili’s in morgantown, pa to the pizza place in nome whose delivery team uses planes. i wore out the tires on my car and my patience with airlines and the transportation security administration. two hundred and ninety two out of 325 is 90% and the remaining ten percent were dead, spambots, ignored my invitations, or declined my conditions.
in the albany, new york apartment i was told by a t.s.a. agent that she would put her hands on my ankles and feel me up until she “reached resistance”. like a good catholic girl, i put my knees together. in her own little braille, she was able to establish that i was wearing a tanga panty and that it had been several weeks since i had brazilianized myself. everybody stopped to watch. i was chagrined but i think anything a t.s.a. agent is going to do to you in their offer of a “private” room is going to be much worse.
my passport has a lot of stamps and looks like i’m either a terrorist, a drug mule, or a war criminal who is confused about which countries have extradition policies. most countries, i got off the plane, paid a customs official some money, got that magic stamp on the passport and went on my way. the exception was india which required three weeks notice, a money order and an appointment at the consulate.
this coming week was set aside for brazil. i had managed the visa application. no problems. but then my two chaperones had their visas denied.
captain reginald gholston was the 32d facebook friend i visited last year. he also chaperoned me on two facebook trips. i was planning to go to brazil with him and last year’s facebook friend #57 vince peters. it’s important in meeting any new friends that you have safeguards: for instance, take a trusted friend, meet in public, and NEVER agree to meet someone in their home or to invite them into yours. out of the ten percent of facebook friends with whom i didn’t meet, two were gentlemen who would only meet me in my house or theirs. so i didn’t. but i would have if i could have brought a chaperone.
a week before a scheduled trip, a brazilian visa speed bump. reggie and vince can’t get visas. i’ve got one.
my choices: go it alone, reschedule, go to the next place on the agenda and come back to brazil another time, or cry. i did the cry thing.
reggie is being deployed to afghanistan next month. he has been deployed to iraq twice. i feel like he’s a son–er, younger brother–to me. i had hoped he would have fun in brazil.
in mexico city, reggie and i met my facebook friend #79 yoshi maeshiro whom i knew because he admires my grandfather fritz leiber, jr.’s science fiction novels. long after i was asleep at the hotel, reggie went out to a samba bar. it was a photo finish getting to the airport for an eight a.m. flight back to the states. reggie was smiling. i wanted him to smile after he had seen brazil!
after the nice, long cry, i remembered what one has to do when there’s a speed bump —
we strike west for los angeles and las vegas. this is going to be like a combination of three musketeers, driving miss daisie and the hangover. except i don’t want to be the dude who loses a tooth!
obrigada brazil–i will reschedule and be there soon!
arlynnpresser 