that is not actually f2fb friend #223 mary's porsche. it's not mine either. but a porsche is a nice background!
when i first joined facebook, i was just a girl who couldn’t say no. if someone friendship requested, i said yes. i figured they had a good reason. or i was popular. or i would be rude to say no. i was, to not put too fine a point on it, a facebook slut.
i was friends with f2fb friend #223 mary knudson before there was facebook and will be friends after facebook fatigue sets in. we worked together on a pta benefit but hadn’t seen each other face to face for close to two years. it was fun to sit down and gab. we both coped to misunderstanding the word “friend” in the facebook sense. your facebook friends list very often is just a phone book of everyone you’ve ever met. your personal friends list is entirely different.
after a lovely lunch (thank you mary!) i walked home and ran into a friend with whom i was once facebook friends. i think she defriended me. and this is what she had to say and you won’t believe what i said out loud. but with great affection.
i wish the lady in the van hadn’t stopped to ask for directions because this was getting pretty interesting!
i have been laying out money for tix and lodging for the international leg of my facebook new year’s resolution. i am very nearly broke but i believe i can do this. still, i have spent a lot of nights worried about money and logistics.
i have been sending out messages to the phillippines, mumbai, korea, taiwan, uae, and other places confirming that people will be where they say they are. then i received a message from one facebook friend whom i have not seen in a quarter century. we have been facebook friends for about two years.
in two separate messages, she indicated she wanted me to buy and bring to her a computer. she is an american working at a university in a country that would be seven stops into the trip. i had two concerns: a) money because i am on such a tight budget, and b) transporting this computer. as to the latter, i was concerned about dropping it, having it stolen, having it get lost at on of the seven airports, or–after my experience with the canadians, i really freaked–having a border or customs official ask me why i was carrying my own computer and a brand spanking new computer. was i transporting something for somebody else? off to guantanamo!
i considered that if i could solve (a) money i could ship the computer. i also wondered if this meant that if i got into the country where she was living (an eight hour flight from the previous stop together with a nine hour train ride) and i DIDNT have the computer, would she refuse to see me.
and this is where facebook (and all virtual and epistolary) relations get into trouble. i posted about the dilemma yesterday, including a video of murphy my friend with a car who said “don’t do the computer, let me drive you to arkansas to visit one of your facebook friends” within hours had an angry message from the friend. well, ex-friend–she has defriended me and blocked me so that i can’t even send her an apology and i owe her one: i was wrong.
she wanted me to purchase the computer, yes, and to transport it, true. but she intended to pay me back for the cost of the computer. i didn’t get that last part. she is quite rightly offended and she made some attendant comments about my project, my personality, and the unforgivable nature of what i had done.
this is something i use for self-destruction. i wanted to put on my pajamas, bolt the doors, turn off the phone and watch movies on hulu.com while drinking this. until i passed out!
sometimes i think amy winehouse got exactly what she was aiming for, which is what i felt like aiming for–oblivion. just so i don’t have to be me anymore. just so i don’t have to feel the self-loathing anymore. i didn’t do it, although i know i have to watch myself for a few days to make sure the memory doesn’t trigger a trip to the grocery store liquor aisle.
and so i shoot out into the internet, knowing that i can’t do it through facebook, an unrestrained apology that i know will not be accepted and i will be unforgiven.
there was no room at the inn. that’s how another story gets started too. . . i flew into albany, new york with the boy scouts brandon and ben. we picked up a car at thrifty and aimed north for montreal. but we faltered. all of us were tired. we weren’t scheduled for anything until the next day, so we called the most reliable of hotels. . . the hampton inn, this one of plattsburgh, new york.
there was no room. or, at least, no nonsmoking rooms. we made a decision to stay at the econolodge. it was even cheaper! always a good thing.
the boys retired to their room and i went to mine. i was struck by the smell of socks that had done their service in a stressful athletic setting. was it me? i smelled my pits and sat down on the bed so i could lift my delicate size ten foot up to my nose. airplane industry being what it is, even a one and a half hour flight is an all day operation. but this wasn’t me. it was the room. i looked up and realized that part of the ceiling was collapsing. there had been some water damage. there would be no heat or air conditioning because the unit by the window was under a drip drip drip from the ceiling. there were mouse droppings in the bathroom. but i was too tired. i went to sleep fully dressed. i woke up to hampton inn envy.
the next morning, i couldn't help but take a picture of the hampton inn across the way. hampton inns are always clean, they give you treats, and they listen when you have a problem. i am absolutely not paid to say this, i'm just saying it because it's true.
but it’s okay. this morning is a new day! off to montreal, where i’m hoping to see the biodome. but i’ll do whatever my facebook friends want to do! as long as i can find a hampton inn afterwards.
so i could have said anything: food poisoning, my dog died, car accident, traffic (related), family drama, sudden call from the president asking for advice on foreign relations.
oh, but there would be 1. no, 2. don’t have a dog, 3. uh, didn’t didn’t actually get into a car, 4. good one, vague, but actually, no, and 5. i’m not sure he needs or wants my advice.
mr. f2fb friend #205 bill wedan was performing in a concert on saturday night. i prepared. i was dressed. keys on the kitchen counter. mapquest printed out. jack the gps dude performing back up.
and i thought i can’t. because i will have a heart attack on the highway, explode spontaneously, anaphylaxic shock, uh oh, it’s the usual stuff i do. but i gave in. this year has been about not giving in. about going out. doing it. meeting the friends, seeing the world, getting it all done.
gosh, this is from a party where i met f2fb friend #197 terri wojak for the first time. i should learn to keep my eyes open!
so, i stood up mr. f2fb friend #205 at his concert. for the first time, i decided to not use an excuse. instead, i wrote him and said “i’m sorry. i had a big anxiety attack and there was no way i was going to get out of the house.”
i’ve never thought that somebody could say “okay” to that.
he did.
i’ve had a few rough days but i got out there, and i picked up bill wedan at his home on fargo avenue in chicago.
this is the home bill wedan grew up in and now that his parents have passed, he is in charge
he offered to pick me up at my house for lunch this afternoon. i decided it was a wrong idea. i need to go out into the world. even as far as fargo. avenue. but also, i needed to apologize. he accepted graciously.
i wonder if some of us occasionally (or not so occasionally) make up excuses. this was one time when i didn’t.
michel eyquem de montaigne was the original blogger–back in the sixteenth century, he wrote about friendship, cannibalism, why we wear clothes, why sex with an amputee is more pleasurable than with any woman with two legs and two arms. he wrote a book entitled “essays”. essayer means to try in french and he was trying to understand his world through blogging–well, writing about himself.
i have been reading montaigne this past week on a three day sabbatical from the f2fb new year’s resolution to meet and spend time with all 325 of my facebook friends that i had on december 31, 2010.
a lot of philosophers, particularly the classical ones, are obsessed with death. as cicero the roman dude said, “to philosophize is to learn how to die.” i think of anxiety attacks as moments in which i am utterly aware that i am about to die.
montaigne had a near death experience when he fell off a horse when he was thirty six. he seemed none the worse for wear and in fact felt a new optimism and spirit because of it. and he said to hell with the classical dudes–
“if you don’t know how to die, don’t worry: nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. she will do this job perfectly for you; don’t bother your head about it.”
i want to be more like montaigne. or perhaps more like f2fb friend #204 scott rodgers, who captures smiles.
although he's used to being a photographer you have to admit he'd make a great fashion model!
scott and i know each other because i coached his older son david in soccer. i coached boys’ soccer for nine years until i figured out that my sons joseph and eastman don’t like sports (although to be fair, joseph boxes and eastman is on the oberlin college bowling team). scott recently started a new family, becoming a father to two young ones even as david his son goes off to college. scott is brave in a very montaigne way! i admire that a lot!
brandon lee brown, jillian fox, phil fox and me--there is no way around it, these suits are not flattering!
“IS THAT MZZZZZZZZ ARLYNN??????”
i loved hearing that from mr. fwfb #202’s voice across the parking lot of the http://www.chicagoindoorracing.com/ indoor racing club at buffalo grove. f2fb #202 phil fox showed up with his beloved bride #f2fb 203 jillian fox! i had forgotten that phil was the sweet young boy who worked at his family’s stationery shop in winnetka –he sold me school supplies. every year, parents received a list of baffling items that were necessary: number two pencils, kleenex in individual packets, post it notes, reams of lined paper. phil’s family business was to put all those items together and me? i would just show up and say “eastman has mrs. smith for this year” and they’d have all the school supplies in a bag, ready for purchase.
the fox’s were part of a several generations of winnetka life. but with walmart, costco, target–it ain’t happening. but the problem for small towns is that those little businesses, like the fox family stationery store, provide tax revenue. in addition to putting together the bag of school supplies so you don’t have to sort through the two hundred items your teacher demands in september, they also pay up in taxes. phil and his father both work now in corporate.
but the evening wasn’t about the death of small town businesses. it was about racing. one of the boy scouts filming me took a little time off to race, but he caught this. oh, shoot, did i really say that to him?????
the two foxes (jeez, it’s not hard to consider jokes about their names–i mean, phil and jill???) taught me about http//geocaching.com/
where you find things that people have left for anyone to find. oh, gosh, it was so exciting! today i found something in winnetka! i had to crawl up under the park benches to find it, but i am fearless.
okay, maybe not. i have had a setback. i was supposed to go out on saturday night. i dressed. i put out the keys. i gps’ed. i fucked up. i decided i had cardiomyopathy but also i had grave doubts about how the new years resolution is working out. i am 203 friends in and i am uncertain how to continue! i said no and stayed home. i apologized to the facebook friend who would be mr. 204. he is the most gracious. i spent the day reevaluating and hiding. i do a lot of hiding from the world.
but. . . i have zeroed in on booking alaska! i am so scared! who knew that i have facebook friend who lives on the cusp of the arctic circle?????
a good teacher makes for a good school year. a bad teacher can destroy a kid. at the beginning of each school year, i always hoped for a good teacher for joseph and eastman–someone who would believe in them, respect them, and have their respect. a good teacher means a good year and my boys had that. except for eastman’s second grade.
mrs. s. was a young teacher, very intelligent, but also possessing of a horrific fault–she didn’t like eastman. she thought he was very unintelligent. in a word, she thought he was stupid because he would daydream instead of finishing his math worksheets. oddly, she was giving him the same worksheets he had been given in kindergarten so he was a maybe bored. but also, maybe there are teacher-child relationships that are just fraught.
it was a horrific year. he thought he was stupid. i started to doubt myself as a mom and to even doubt him. our one parent-teacher conference ended with him and me in tears and mrs. s. with a smug expression. i let him stay home way too many days.
f2fb friend #201 julie halpern made that year bearable. most people know julie as a novelist of some note–in fact, when we met at the steak n’shake for lunch she gave me a first edition of her third book.
julie has also written "get well soon" and "the wild nerd yonder"
julie also had a second career–she worked as an educator in many capacities. and in eastman’s second grade, she ran a reading group of which eastman was a part. they read dr. doolittle. she adored eastman. he returned those feelings. she thought eastman was funny. he thought she was grand. they were both right!
at the end of a school year, a relationship between teacher and student ends–in mrs. s.’s case she was fired. she had not liked eastman but she had also not liked a lot of other of her students. eastman had a different third grade experience although, unfortunately, it didn’t include being in julie’s reading group. but they met up again when eastman was in eighth grade and julie was assigned to be his advisor. she was at that point writing her first novel “get well soon” and she trusted him enough to ask him to read the manuscript. he felt terrifically honored and he put his best effort into reading it.
julie and i met at the steak n' shake happy hour where from two to four p.m. milkshakes are half priced. why is a happy hour longer than sixty minutes?
eastman was certainly changed by his relationship with julie but one of the surprises in talking to julie was finding out that eastman changed her. a good teacher makes for a good school year, but sometimes a good student can make for a good year for the teacher. i felt proud of him and i think every parent should make a point of seeking out a former teacher of their children just so they can hear what happened in the classroom.
however, at the end of lunch, i did not end up with great parental blackmail material. instead, julie and i decided to get eastman a stuffed animal. sure, he’s a sophomore at oberlin college, but every boy would like a stuffed animal. i thought we should aim for a smurf.
i am grateful to julie–and then i had to say goodbye because i had to go auto racing with f2fb friend #202. yesterday was a very big day!
f2fb friend #199 jonathan boyd grew up with a dream–he wanted to be a commercial pilot. to be the guy who gets us all where we need to go. so he went to the air force academy to learn to fly, fulfilling that dream while also serving our country. he discovered that he has horrific vertigo when he’s at the front of the plane. the air force asked him to consider working as a navigator which is an even harder job for someone with a tendency towards vertigo.
i didn't get to the space and rocket museum of huntsville, but this auto supply shop had its own rocket. just as nice!
jonathan was forced to give up his dream. a lot of people would become bitter. a lot of people would find it tough to go on. but jonathan has a quality i admire and wish i had–he’s flexible, he’s sunny in his disposition, and he truly accepts what life gives him. he’s a genius too, although he’d never admit to it, and our country is lucky to have him working as a project manager in defense work right now in huntsville, alabama. he took all his skills and all his training into a new direction. i like that.
we met because jonathan and i both play online scrabble. we have a mutual friend, f2fb friend #10 john and 11 alice lafond. john sometimes challenged both jonathan and me to games. i always lost.
i had never jonathan met before, but he directed me to the blue plate cafe in huntsville which was just a few miles from the hotel i stayed at. the boy scouts were there, with their cameras. they took this shot of jonathan and me.
jonathan is f2fb friend #199! the number is significant as it is a chen and permutable prime as well as a lucas number!
jonathan was mildly disappointed he wasn’t facebook friend number two hundred, and i suppose he has a point because while the number has a lot to recommend itself, it is–within the context of the thue-morse sequence 199 is an odious number.
i thought i was going to meet f2fb friend #200 on this trip. and that it would happen in huntsville. because decatur, just a few miles outside of huntsville is the home of samuel scruggs, a facebook friend i have never met. samuel is the cousin of another facebook friend, f2fb #32 reggie gholston. i have tried everything to get to see samuel–messages and posts to samuel, calling the phone number listed on his page (it’s out of service) and have asked reggie to intervene. but samuel won’t respond.
so i gotta ask as i leave huntsville partly with success and partly in defeat. .. .
so, in woodstock, georgia they have a dwarf house. unfortunately, it was a sunday and it was closed.
i don’t know why woodstock, georgia would have a dwarf house, but everything about woodstock was a little surreal. mostly because i came into town at four thirty in the morning after eighteen hours of being tossed about by the airline like a hacky sack. who knew that the quickest route to woodstock, georgia was drink beer in the airport lounge for three hours, fly to miami, repeat the beer process, fly to atlanta and then rent a car to drive?
but i love woodstock in particular because i got to see f2fb friend #198 dale morgan. i went to college with dale back when both of us had long, curly, out of control hair. he was a philosophy major, i was history.
i felt sort of dopey because i started to tell his kids all about how he won the philosophy major of the year award when we both graduated in 1981. it turns out i was wrong. he did not actually win that award although i could have sworn that in june of 1981 we were sitting next to each other in north central college’s auditorium when they announced his name.
he has done very well for himself–a beautiful wife, three children who joined us for lunch (what kid is willing to do that????), and a gorgeous house. dale was cool in college and he is cool even today.
dale, susan, chelsea, duncan and dylan morgan (oh, and i'm in the back there too!)
then me and the boy scouts got in the car and headed for huntsville, alabama–home to two facebook friends jonathan boyd and samuel scruggs!
maybe i don’t like the nightlife. i’m an early bird special girl. five o’clock is quite late enough for dinner and pajamas at seven seems de rigeur. dinner at eight? what is that all about?
however, i have spent the last three nights out on the town for the purpose of fulfilling my new years resolution to meet all (at the time) 325 facebook friends.
so tuesday night was baseball–specifically the sox versus the cleveland indians. i thought baseball was nine innings but these guys were having so much fun that they extended the game to fourteen innings. at that point, well after one a.m. and as near as i can interpret the action on the field, the two teams shook hands, patted each other’s asses and agreed that the sox won.
wednesday night i went to the wonderbar (650 n. rush) to see lonie walker, but more specifically, my facebook friend f2fb #196 downtown tony brown. i got there early, which in bar scene is not cool. being anywhere late, particularly the next day, is cool. but i saw how lonie and the bad ass company band of which downtown is a member plays when the band outnumbers the audience. they still rock it as if they were playing for a thousand facebook friends! after the first set, i bought downtown a few buttery nipples. it’s a drink, not a condition. so here i am at downtown’s lunch break–
i was careful to explain to the drummer that he was the fourth best drummer in the world–right behind david presser (my stepson who is not a facebook friend but is nonetheless quite wonderful), joseph presser (#61) and eastman presser (#1). a good drummer is able to play on the third floor and make the ceiling fixtures on the first floor quake. and give me a migraine. the drummer from bad ass offered his bona fides. i said maybe another time.
last night–continuing my string of out of the house nights–i went to a botox party. it was an event at the elyssian hotel sponsored by a plastic surgeon dr. dayan. there were a lot of women, many of whom were on their way to auditions for the remake of the movie brazil. and aestheticians, one of whom applied enough glitter on my eyes that i don’t ever have to do that again. she was a professional who has several times done kim kardashian–in a makeup way. she gave me this exclusive–
KIM KARDASHIAN’S BUTT IS NOT REAL!!! SHE WEARS BUTT PADS!!
this struck me as strange because when i was growing up in the sixties my adoptive mother mrs. patrick was quite unhinged over the fact that i had a butt. a big butt. that suggested i was of a “lower” ethnicity. i did exercises to reduce my butt. i could have donated my butt to the kardashians!
one gal at the party asked my age. i said that i was seventy. she asked how long i had been a patient of the kindly surgeon. i said that i was on a diet of white wine and glitter and hadn’t yet needed his services. she agreed that it was a good diet. because even though there were hors d’oeuvres they were passed about as if all the guests were of an aleutian family on an ice floe about to shove off mom.
the boy scouts arrived and were thrown out. every documentarian should have an “i was thrown out” moment and i was so proud for them. but i didn’t forget to have some time with f2fb friend #197 terri wojak. i didn’t know how i knew her but i think it’s because i’m fifty one and i could be somebody who could benefit from her course on skin care. it’s only $295 dollars and there’s five weeks of intense training on how to make the best of the epidermis.
terri is the gorgeous one. i'm the gal who just got glitter on her eyelids.
i left the party, mostly because i didn’t know anybody besides terri who needed to talk to the other guests. and the glitter eye shadow was migrating to my retinas. i am old. i don’t mind that. i was surprised at the frenzy of the party–we want to avoid the aspects of age but we are happier growing old than dying young. and i was reminded that the previous night i had seen lonie walker and her band–and she wears the grey hair quite proudly beautifully. please if you are ever in chicago go see her at the wonderbar just to see her beauty.
i have resolved to tell everyone that i’m seventy. lying upwards about your age gives you a lot of street cred, and as for showing up at a downtown tony brown concert. . . no matter what band he’s fronting, just buy him a buttery nipple. or stop at the 7-11 before you see him and show him a buttery one!
arlynnpresser 