I haven’t felt like writing a blog entry in a long time, but I have been updating my friends, colleagues, and the world about my life in other ways. This morning, I feel moved to recap the previous year and look forward to the next.
I continue to take photographs and share them on Flickr. Some of my recent adventures include hiking Camelback Mountain for the first time, a weekend getaway to Jerome, going to the Arizona State Fair for the first time in the five years that I’ve lived here, going “full frame” by trading in my Canon Digital Rebel XTi and EF-S lenses for a used Canon 5D, and meeting a longtime Flickr friend from Brooklyn who visited me and my husband with his husband. It was great to bring the online life and real life together, and we all really hit it off. There are several other photo sets I’ve posted in months since my last blog post as well. The best way to keep up with what I’m up to in a visual way is to follow my Flickr photostream.
I’ve also really gotten into Facebook this year. I don’t add people I don’t know as Friends, and I don’t have a Fan Page, but I do enjoy keeping up with my friends through status updates, photos, videos, links, etc. I am sort of the designated photographer at gatherings of friends and coworkers, so it’s always fun to upload an album from a shared event and tag everyone in it who’s on Facebook– which is most of them. For a while there, I was spending a couple/three hours a day on Facebook, but I’ve cut back because I have so many other priorities. I felt I was neglecting my photography and Flickr social circle for a while there, so I’ve returned to spending a bit more time on that. One thing I love that Flickr added in the last couple of months is People in Photos, which allows you to tag your Flickr friends in photos the way you can tag your friends in photos on Facebook. Those friends have to be Flickr members in order to be tagged, so it’s most useful for photos from FlickrMeets; that is, when a group of photo geeks get together to go on a shooting spree. Not necessarily good for your neighbor’s family’s Thanksgiving party unless they’re all Flickrites themselves. Thanks to this new feature and my general hamminess, I can now point you to photos of me on Flickr. As of this writing, there are over 900, though I’m not sure they are all public!
I have struggled to manage my time on the Internet ever since I first got online in 1995. I hesitate to say that I have an Internet addiction, because I don’t like all the baggage that comes with the term “addiction,” but I will say that there are times I spend too many hours on Web sites. And maybe I do have an Internet addiction.
Lately, I notice — especially with Facebook — that I get pain in my elbow and wrist from so much mouse clicking to follow everyone’s posts. I read all my Friends’ postings, regardless of how well I know them, and I just keep reading and commenting and reading and refreshing pages. There are people in my Friends list that I’ve spent more time with on Facebook than in real life. But no matter what our relationship in real life, I find myself reading everything they post. It begins to seem as though my “best friends” are the ones who interact with me the most on Facebook. Yet that’s insidious, because it doesn’t mean they’re closer to me; it just means they’re on Facebook a lot and they like to interact with people on it. It’s seductive to sit there clicking, clicking, clicking on everyone’s content, yet I have to do something about my overuse strain. I am, after all, a sign language interpreter, and I have to save my hands and arms for work.
And speaking of seductive, it is so tempting to add all the people Facebook suggests to me as Friends– well, all the people I know, anyway. I never went and added all my friends Friends or anything crazy like that, but I did add almost all the classmates, coworkers, and friends I recognized. It got to the point where I had 378 Friends! As I started following more closely, I realized that I hadn’t even remembered some of my classmates correctly. In one case, I thought I was following a guy who was one class ahead of me until I realized that I was following his brother who was two classes behind me. He seems like a great guy, but the last straw was when he made that “tell me something you remember about me” prompt in his status message, and I realized, well, I didn’t remember anything.
What if I die and no one remembers me? Does it make my life any less valid? I’ve been asking myself these questions lately as I find myself feeling compelled to share my life online.
When I got a Flickr account in 2006, I felt compelled to publish every good photo I took. In turn, I felt compelled to document my life in photos so I could share those photos — my life — on Flickr. Then I got a Facebook and Twitter account, and I began to feel compelled to share my life there, too. I enjoyed the response, and that drove me to share more. There’s nothing wrong with the impulse to share experiences, but I have to believe that my life is worth living regardless of whether I’m acknowledged for it.
Maybe I’m having a midlife moment. I’m 42 years old. It’s unclear whether I’ve made a mark on the world. And it’s time to decide whether or not I care. I don’t have kids, my parents are getting older, and I don’t have a lot of siblings or cousins. Who is going to remember me? And does it even matter.
On the one hand, I am coming to terms with my nature. I need to communicate with others, to create my own expression and share it with the world. Looking at people’s enthusiastic self-expression in social media outlets, I can see that I am not alone.
I’ve always been just a little bit of an activist. I wrote research papers in high school about the Nazi extermination of gays and about the Stonewall riots when I was only 16 and 17. I really wanted to learn and teach my history.
In 1983, when I was 15, I was in my final sex education class (all about sexually transmitted diseases), and they didn’t teach HIV prevention at all. They said they hadn’t received any training about it and they didn’t have a curriculum. They let me stand up in front of the class and teach my peers everything I knew about the disease and how to avoid contracting it / spreading it. Looking back even now, what I said was correct. Less than five years later, the school district not only had a curriculum to teach HIV prevention; they changed the name of sophomore Sex Ed to something like AIDS and Other Sexually Transmitted Diseases.
I never make a secret of the fact that I love men and chose to spend the rest of my life with one. My husband and I hold hands wherever we go. We enjoy it, and it’s the least we can do to keep pushing the envelope in all sectors of society. We’re here, we’re queer, enjoy it!
Sums up how I feel about meeting my life partner, Andy, almost five years before the day I recorded this. From the Broadway musical On The Town, music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Betty Comden & Adolph Green.
Yeah, I could take about 3 pounds of fat off my belly, but it irks me to be called “overweight” by my new Wii Fit. I’m 5’10 1/2″ and the Wii Fit only let me enter either 5’10″ or 5’11″ when I set it up over a week ago. I entered 5’10″ and it kept telling me I was “overweight” in its robotic little child’s voice and fattening up my Mii until it looked like a barrel on sticks. After more than a week of that, I finally said, “Damn it!” and changed my height to 5’11″. Why not round up instead of down? Now, it tells me I’m “normal”– at the very heaviest end of normal. Can you believe that? Urgh!
This evening I had a brief bout of self-doubt, a fear of social ostracism. It began when I considered going to #evfn (East Valley Friday Nights), a Twitter gathering or “Tweetup” organized on Twitter and taking place, this night, in Chandler. Mind you, Chandler is pretty far from my home in Phoenix, and just last Friday night I passed on driving out to Paradise Valley to attend shabbat services because it was “too far.” So I was already questioning my motives. Why was I willing to consider driving out to Chandler to meet some “tweeple”? Could it be because I saw a tweet earlier today from Rene Gutel saying, “@evo_terra Mind if I join y’all?” (Rene Gutel is a local freelance journalist who often contributes stories to NPR, so I thought it would be neat to meet her.) Could it be because I see businesses bending over backward to support Tweetups in ways I’ve never seen them support Flickrmeets? (When local Twitter members went to a Phoenix Suns Game recently, they all got matching (free?) t-shirts and a welcome on the JumboTron. And at the #evfn Tweetup at Whole Foods in Chandler tonight, the store actually printed a gorgeous sign to welcome them.) Could it be the age-old yearning to hang out with “the cool kids”? Well, it could be any or all of those things. But something kept me from going… Continue reading →
Each of us is whole and complete, a heart that beats at its own pace, a light that shines in the dark. Whether or not we have a Valentine today, we can love ourselves, love those who love us, and even love those who don’t. Though we be apart from each other, we are a part of each other.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
This is a photograph of blue LED icicle lights taken through a wide heart-shaped aperture with the Lensbaby Composer. I turned the manual focus ring so that the little lights were out of focus enough to became spectral highlights in the shape of the aperture they shone through.
This is a photo of a neighbor’s lingering holiday lights taken with the Lensbaby Composer with a heart-shaped wide aperture. The manual focus ring was adjusted to place the lights out of focus and create spectral highlights that appear as heart shapes due to the shape of the aperture.
NOTE: Thanks to you, this photo hit Flickr’s Explore pages! You are welcome to blog it, download it, print it, share it, etc. All I ask is that you not use it for non-commercial purposes only & give me photographer credit, e.g. “Photo by Daniel Greene.”
Yesterday morning, I felt rather down about my lack of success in the corporate world, and I put out a call for positive strokes on Twitter and Facebook. They both said, “I’m feeling down, and I need to believe in myself today. Please tell me something you admire about me. I’ll do the same for you.” (Actually, the update on Facebook began, “Daniel is…’feeling down’” and the rest I kept in the first person.)
I really did feel the need for positive strokes, yet I also thought it would be an interesting experiment in comparing my current self-and-other presence on Twitter and Facebook. The result was that I got more responses on Facebook. This isn’t altogether surprising, since I have more friends on Facebook and it seems to be popular with a larger audience than the geek-and-early-adopter crowd on Twitter. Of course, there could be other reasons for this result that I can’t divine. Anyway, here’s what some of my supporters said: Continue reading →
