7 posts tagged “internet”
Tonight I made one of my rare occasional stops at MySpace (I had mail that a friend posted a comment). While there I read the messages in my inbox, which are all from random unknown people. Typically I never respond to these at all (I say typically because once I did reply to a guy who claimed to be my brother's friend, though honestly I'm not sure if he really was).
I read three messages from complete strangers tonight. All male. They always are.
1. hey, how are you?
2. hi Kymberlee how are you tonight?
My goooodness your cute!!
Nice to meet ya.....:) -Lyle
3. Hey brat, I shtat ur real hair or a wig? I can already tell we wouldn't get along, we're too similar, we both like to rock the fuck out in life and the earth would probably explode if we hung out because of all that energy in once place! I noticed you are a KICKASS go getter...that's so awesome! My ex girlfriend was one of those! If u happen to be a part time World Class Ass Model, you get 3 coolness points for that...get 15 and you get the special prize
Write back
Seriously, that is the order I read them in. And after the third, I'm just kind of left thinking WTF. Does that actually work EVER? Do women actually write back to that? And I have to conclude that some do, just like some people actually click on spam email. The thought of it kind of gives me the heebie jeebies. For $DEITY's sake ladies, have some standards! Do you give your phone number to every construction worker who whistles at you too?
I'm sorry, but I'm not that desparate. Being alone is better than that.
I've discovered a peculiar thing. Twitter* makes me feel more lonely than I do otherwise. I don't have 204 friends. So here are all these people I only peripherally know, with status updates about what they are doing, where they are going, who they are seeing, twitter conversations between people I don't know... Sure, I wouldn't have heard about the incredibly awesome tweenbots experiment if I weren't following a total stranger friend-of-a-friend. But that isn't enough.
So once again I say 'it's not you, it's me' and further throttle my Twitterverse participation. Anyone is welcome to follow me still, and I'll check my replies and respond, but I have to trim my follow list. Please don't take it personally.
*Facebook also has this effect on me, though to a lesser degree for some reason. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to trim my friend list there too.
I don't want to look back at my year and say 'wow, I sure wasted a lot of time on the internet'. So I'm Twittering and Facebooking less, and probably won't be on IM as much either. I'll still blog from time to time, it's not like I'm abandoning all internet communication, I'm just making an effort to throttle back. The internet is a weird way to feel connected with people you aren't actually spending time with, it is a false connection in some ways that can leave you feeling empty. So why not invest time in actually doing things with people IRL? And when I can't go out (like kid weeks) and I don't have friends who are interested/available in coming to hang out at Mission HQ, that is a great time to read, paint, knit, game, or do things to improve my home. Or work. Yeah, I'm still doing a lot of that at night and on weekends too.
Since deciding this, I have spent some great quality time with the kids, invested a few hours into refreshing my household budget for 2009, worked, devoured the short book This Is For You by Rob Ryan (a Valentines gift from a dear friend), and started reading Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips. I love reading, and haven't done nearly as much as I would like in the last several years. At first choosing a book from my very large collection of Things I Bought But Haven't Read Yet was intimidating. The last book I read was Farenheit 451 and it made such a deep and profound effect on me, I figured anything I chose would be disappointing by comparison. Given how out of practice I am at leisure reading, I decided to start with popular fiction that I know a friend is also reading.
The premise of Gods Behaving Badly is that 12 Greek gods are still on earth and living in a townhouse in London. Artemis is a dog walker. Apollo is a TV psychic. Aphrodite is a phone sex operator. Dionysus is a DJ. Eros has become a Christian. And being immortal but no longer worshipped, they are bored, unhappy, and losing their powers. The first night I picked up the book I read through chapter 12. The final page of chapter 12 said something that struck me deeply, and reminded me of why I loved F451.
"If you knew you only had a hundred years to live," he said eventually, "what would you do with the time you had left?"
-Eros to Artemis
An excellent question that underlies many of my favorite movies too (American Beauty, Stranger Than Fiction). If you aren't happy now, what are you waiting for? Life is finite, and no one knows how much time they have left, so figure out what makes you happy and go do that.
It surprised me that this first seemingly trivial book I choose to read reminds me of my goals for 2008, to live deliberately, that every day I wake up I have within myself the potential to do anything, and the future holds untold opportunities. I do not want to drift through life, don't want to make my decisions based on comfort of the known/present or on fear of the unknown/future. I don't want to live my life based on what other people or society think I should want or do, but go out and experience everything the world has to offer. So I guess it isn't such a bad book to start with after all, because it reminded me of this and reinforced the decision to adjust where I have been spending my time of late (sorry Tweeps).
And then, the very next night, a friend had the following message on his IM:
"no matter how far you've gone down the wrong road, turn back"
I'm not a spiritual person, I don't believe in 'signs', I think people see what they want to see most of the time. Maybe I'm looking for inspiration or validation that my life philosophy isn't totally naive and crazy. I don't know. I just know that I had a challenging winter and am feeling more like my usual self again, filling my life with hope for a future full of joy and happiness, rich new experiences and rewarding interactions with the world around me. I'm feeding my soul with music and books, and trying to focus on the limitless potential of the wide open future. I know there will be sadness and hurt, that is inevitable and part of life. And that's okay. I'm not so Suzy Sunshine as to think that life will ever be 100% perfect 24/7. I still choose to look for the good each day. Just trying to stack the Self Fulfilling Prophesy deck in my favor.
omg.
omfg.
this is hysterical. this online web diversion to any functional work will take your input and anagram it into something else. a sampling of my friends and co-worker's anagramed names include:
Kinky ladies' man
Hey! I am a clever
Evil present
Mad wrench anus
Sore sphincter
Squirt canoodle
I'm an ass-head
Havoc and cheat him (the real irony is that the first time I entered this name it resulted in a buffer overflow in the app. if you knew the name, you'd laugh too. hahahahahahahha)
actually, all of these are probably a LOT funnier if you know the person the anagram is derived from. some of them made me cry I was laughing so hard.
ok, enough laughing for one night. I've got to get some sleep!
apparently the likelihood of my being a cannibal is only slightly more remote than my being a fed or a preacher. hm.
You are Malcolm Reynolds (Captain)
Click here to take the "Which Serenity character are you?" quiz... |
I didn't get online while in VA and now that we are back in NC, the intarwebnet has been down at my in-laws - a technician MAY be out tomorrow, but maybe not until next week. The next door neighbor is away on vacation and has an unsecured wi-fi network, but for some inexplicable reason we've got connectivity tonight, so I'm not having to leach bandwidth from the neighbor to post this. I've been blogging in notepad the last few days waiting to post it all - so here you go. I've edited the posting dates so they are published following the timeline they were written in.
And since I've brought up the idea of leaching wifi... I was astounded by the number of wifi networks I could pick up from the car driving down I-395 in the Arlington area. About 25% of them were unsecured. If I were a full time geek still (aka didn't have two small kids in the car whose auto travel tolerance limits are about 90 minutes shorter than the trip is going to take) we'd have cruised by the Pentagon just for giggles to see what popped up.
By the way, Granny played Wii-Tennis until almost midnight last night, and she's playing again now (10pm EST). I promise you a photo of Wii-Granny soon. I hope this doesn't screw up her real tennis game. She's pretty doggone good. And it cracks me up that we appear to have gotten her hooked on it (if only the photos would show you how she heckles her doubles partner and the other team when they cost her a point. Its priceless). I didn't know Nintendo was going after the 70+ age bracket. LOL.
wow, I can sure be productive when I have no phone, internet, or cable tv. Late last week the city dug up our street for some utility work, and apparently nicked the cable line because we started suffering packet loss of ~25% (thus Fun Friday's 'save the packets, save the world' shirt choice). Cable company sent a technician out to check on it, and as a result of his efforts, we lost the tenuous link to the signal that we had. Excellent. Unfortunately we live about 50 feet outside of cell phone range, so I have to walk to the mailboxes to make any calls. Because we get our phone through cable we are high priority for them to fix - if we were just getting internet/television there's no telling when they'd come back, but today they are going to temporarily run cable through the trees while they get the permits necessary to dig the street back up and run new line.
So what did I do sans intarwebnets and television for an entire weekend? I cleaned out the closets and donated nine garbage bags of clothing to charity this morning. For the record, it wasn't all my clothing. I packed away the winter sweaters, and found my short shorts for summer. Gave away all the BIG clothes from 2004 when I was 40 pounds overweight, anything that is no longer my style, things I was given that were never my style but I felt guilty not keeping... Going through the bins of clothes I packed away when I got pregnant in 2005 was like going shopping - I found all these great things I'd forgotten I owned. So today I'm wearing an old outfit, but it feels new. ha! Other stuff I got done: got the car washed, packed away all the kids clothes that they've outgrown, cleaned up their rooms, played with them in the yard, went out to breakfast both mornings, did a few loads of laundry... all horribly domestic, but it felt SO GOOD to clean up and eliminate some of the clutter. Next on my mission to de-clutter: take maternity clothes and the high end kids clothes to a re-sale shop, continue to sell off excess baby gear we don't need anymore...
