Nom de Plume

This post pretty much says it all.

Okay, maybe it doesn’t because I feel compelled to add:

I had signed up for another Facebook account because there were people I wanted to get back in touch with. But you know, reconnecting and Farmtown (yes, Farmtown, isn’t that pathetic?) just aren’t enough to make me want to deal with Facebook anymore. I’m pretty easy to find and don’t really need more ways to procrastinate.

I don’t want to have to fiddle with my privacy settings all the time. I’m tired of people I know who just happen to be conservative suggest I join the “Stop giving welfare to illegal immigrants” group. And I really don’t care what someone had for breakfast/lunch/dinner and how delish/yummy/nom nom it was. No offense. I know, I know, it’s a great way to connect, share pictures, blah blah. I just can’t find enough oomph to care. The fact is, all this social networking weirds me out a bit, and it’s pretty ironic that the bigger a reach my blog has (that wordpress-twitter-facebook integration), the more constrained I feel about posting anything real–i.e., not about chickens.

So for all those facebookers out there, enjoy it and have fun. You know where to find me.

test

Which was the only book I loved more than Pat the Bunny when I was a wee little thing. So imagine my delight when I opened up Google this morning to see this:

I’m a freelance writer and it is a truth generally accepted that writers must, as part of the writing process, procrastinate. I have lots of procrastinatory techniques. There’s wordtwist.org-ying. There’s the Soapdish Forum. There’s Google news and there’s Youtube. There’s Twitter. There’s blogging, which of course leads to checking stats. There’s reading blogs. And then there’s the strangely seductive world of Christian stay-at-home/work-at home/homeschooling/farmsteading mom blogs.

I am not a Christian in any sense of the word, though of course my mother dragged me to Episcopal (or Anglican if we were overseas) church every Sunday until I was 12, at which point she let me sink unabetted into heathendom, where I’ve happily lived ever since. But there’s just something about all these blogs of all these conservative women that is fascinating.

A lot of it is that I don’t know any conservative Christian women. The conservatives I know aren’t terribly religious. The Christians are usually pretty liberal; they’re Espiscopalian or Presbyterians. Every now and then there’s a mild Methodist or two, or maybe a Catholic who’s left behind the religion but kept the guilt. But the two together–now that’s something else. I feel like a voyeur poking into these lives that are so different from mine, a world where people really do use wallpaper borders as a decorative feature in dining rooms, and grocery shopping is considered the highlight of the day.

Oh wait. Grocery shopping is usually the highlight of my day too.

Don’t misunderstand me. I am not putting these blogs down. At the end of the post, all personal blogs are really nothing more than an exercise in self-validation–and by all means, I include myself in this category. Then of course, you have all sorts of blog genres: House blogs, lit blogs, craft blogs. If there’s a word for it, there’s a blog for it. And each one has its own angle, its own way to thrust its content out into the ether, its own method behind its madness.

Except for the Christina SAHM blog. There are hundreds and hundreds of them and for the most part, they’re pretty much interchangeable. Truth to tell, I don’t do more than skim a couple of posts here. The content is usually not terribly interesting. What is interesting is the form:

1. The About Me talks about their wonderful husbands, their children, and their love of Jesus Christ.
2. There’s usually some sort of soundtrack.
3. They sign off every post with a jpeg of their name in a funky font.
4. The header has a large bucolic image / a quote from the Bible / their goals as a Christian woman.

And last, but certainly not least:

5. The content is about how this person is an ordinary person, no different from anyone else.

And this is what I love about them. There’s something so refreshing about people NOT trying to be different, about being just one of many. It’s not about foisting one’s opinion on the world; it’s not about being different. It’s not about being edgier, or more literate. It’s not about drumming up business. (Which, frankly, I have never seen a blog successfully do, but I guess Web 2.0 in the business world is a whole ‘nother post and really, what do I know anyway?) No–it’s about staking out a corner of the Web to be the same as the others in your circle.

And really, sometimes there’s something just a little comforting about that.

There are two truths staring me in the face as I look at the slowly loading admin interface of Wordpress 2.7. The first is that the last year has been hard for me in a lot of different ways. The second is that I miss Wordpress 1.5. Blogging felt so easy back then. I popped in, wrote a post, and voila, the blog lived. These two truths converged; I lacked blog luster and the varying iterations of Wordpress got harder and harder to deal with. Images stopped uploading. The amazon plug in stopped working. The site took longer to load. So I stopped blogging. I had hoped that upgrading my database and getting the latest version would get me back into it. And it has–more blog posts in the past month than in the previous year. Nonetheless, I am growing increasingly disenchanted with Wordpress. The catch is that previous versions lack the functionality that I want, but that functionality comes with a price. Oh, and of course, there’s really no good alternative for what I want.

All of which makes me feel ungrateful. Wordpress is free. And for free, it’s a pretty sweet deal. I do appreciate all the volunteer time and effort that goes into getting the latest version out
and coming up with plug-ins that I can use simply by downloading (right from the admin interface, no less). But you know, it’s SLOOOOOW. Slow to load on the back-end. Slow to load on the front-end. Just freaking slow.

The other slow thing has been stuff just getting better. As I say, the past year was hard. The past six months have been just awful. Among other things: I had the miscarriage; Millie got cancer; I got penumonia and had a bad allergic reaction to the antibiotics; my ex-boyfriend shot himself; work has been slowing down and I’ve been worried; my hypo-google-chondria has spiralled out of control. After we were snowed in for two weeks in December, I’m afraid I just kind of gave up and slid into a depression. The panic attacks haven’t helped. I finally went in last week and now am the somewhat happier owner of a refillable prescription for Xanax, and I’m trying 5HTP to even out the moods as an alternative to the Lexapro prescription I also have. I’ve been taking it for about a week, and it seems to be working. So all this is to say that I think I’m coming out of it.

Oh my gosh, it’s fast. Much faster than IE7. Don’t know about IE8, haven’t downloaded it yet.

I am deleting my Facebook account.

There’s been a lot lot of noise about privacy and what have you on the Web, and I really don’t feel the need to add anything to what anyone else says. They’re a company; they sell information–and that’s life in the 21st century. The myth of privacy at this point is just that: a myth. To be really honest, I don’t know how much that bothers me. What does bother me, however, is that I’ve noticed a huge surge in spam since I signed up for the service. Stupid me for not using a junk e-mail address. Now I’m not saying that they are the reason my e-mail address has been released into the hands of spammers–but I have noticed that in their Privacy Policy , they do not, at any point, ever, nowhere, nohow state, “We do not sell your e-mail addresses.” What they say is:

Facebook is about sharing information with others — friends and people in your networks — while providing you with privacy settings that restrict other users from accessing your information. We allow you to choose the information you provide to friends and networks through Facebook. Our network architecture and your privacy settings allow you to make informed choices about who has access to your information. We do not provide contact information to third party marketers without your permission.

What that says to me is that you have to jump through hoops to make sure your e-mail address isn’t sold. And I’m pretty sure I set my privacy settings at a high enough level–though it was long enough ago that I don’t remember.

And here’s the thing: I don’t like Facebook enough to deal with it. As I mentioned a few posts ago, I have, like, zero interest in being a werewolf or a vampire, I don’t want to fly some fighter jet, and I think writing on someone’s wall is a complete and utter waste of time. And trust me when I say that I’m really good at wasting time without someone else’s help.

it may seem like I’m a naysayer, but that’s not it at all. I love technology as much as the next person. Here I am, after all, blogging. I write about technology (granted for pay). And maybe that’s the point: I’m freelance, which means that I spend the majority of my workdays sitting alone in the shack in front of a computer. 90 percent of my communication during the average day is by e-mail. I work with people I’ve never talked to on the phone, much less met in person. I don’t complain–indeed, it’s a-okay with me. But free time? Well, I don’t want to write on someone’s wall.

Facebook puzzles me because it doesn’t have a clear purpose. I mean, linkedin connects business people; youtube lets you post videos; flickr is for photos. Facebook rolls a whole bunch of functions into one uber site, and while yeah, it’s the natural progression technologically-speaking, I think in some ways social networking has become a concrete example of the way technology has fractured interpersonal relationships. It’s bad enough when I tell Steve to e-mail me his racing schedule when he lives in the same house. It’s worse when the only time I hear from people that I’d like to hear from is when they invite me to plant a peapatch. Or whatever. The point is that yes, I’m now in contact with friends I haven’t heard from in a long time–but when it comes down to it, I’m not really in touch at all. Instead, I’m still sitting in front of my computer without any real connection to who they are as people.

Nor do I want to be a werewolf, a slayer, a fleet commander, or santa. I do not want to plant a green patch or get a free aircraft. I don’t really care all that much about six degrees of separation or solving other people’s online jigsaw puzzles. This is all to say that Facebook is great for getting back in touch with people, but I’d rather stay in touch the “old-fashioned way.” Yep, send me an e-mail.

Okay, this is pretty funny. Remember that little time waster [your name] needs?

Apparently, the [your name] part is confusing. I’ve gotten 140 hits in the past three days for people searching for “your name needs.”

Well, I assume you’re a Mr. because I assume that most people who search for porn online are men. But I could be wrong. In which case, please accept my sincerest apologies for making assumptions about your gender. And I’m assuming that it’s not your gender that’s in question here. I mean, it’s not like you were googling “transsexual porn” or “shemale” or “girls with penises” or any of those other things that I’m seriously going to regret putting into a blog post because the search engines are going to go crazy now.

No, what apparently interests you is “vitiligo porn.”