The UPS truck delivered something today that brought tears to my eyes: my own hardcover copy of the book Sexting including an chapter by lil’ ol’ me. Gale Cengage Learning approached me a year ago about including a blog post of mine, Sexting highlights society’s issues with privacy and shame, in one of their their textbooks. I agreed to publication with a writer’s fee and copy of the book. They complied with a check and a copy of the book as promised. My article appears as chapter two titled “The Threat of Sexting Has Been Exaggerated” on page 15 of the hardcover edition. The book is part of the At Issue: Social Issues series.

Here is the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Sexting / Stefan Kiesbye, book editor.
p. cm. — (At issue)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-7377-5161-1 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-7377-5162-8 (pbk.)
1. Internet and teenagers. 2. Internet–Safety measures. 3. Teenagers–Sexual relations. 4. Electronic mail systems. I. Kiesbye, Stephan. II. Title. III. Series.
HQ799.2.I5.S49 2011
004.67’80835–dc22

I am excited to be a part of this compilation and I look forward to reading the other chapters!

In this signed language video, I talk about my experience of sharing a sample of my interpreting and transliterating work and receiving unsolicited criticism on it. Haters tend to be people with no real names and no creative works of their own. All they do is shoot down others’ work and give nothing to YouTube. As an interpreter, I am courageous enough to share my work–imperfect though it may be–with the world so that people may see it, but I am not thick skinned enough to take criticism about it. I think there are things a person creates and is willing to share with the world but doesn’t want to allow responses on because they don’t want the criticism and they don’t need the praise. This is how I feel about the sample I posted yesterday.

I’m a guy who started writing his own HTML and CSS in 1996; in fact, I was one of the first handful of brave ones on the Internet to style valid HTML with CSS knowing that most browsers couldn’t handle it. After all, what did I have to lose? Little old me with his personal website.

This was a decade before Flickr and YouTube and Facebook and Twitter allowed you to post content with ease and let them take care of the code, and years before every major website was written in structural HTML and styled with CSS. This was back when you had to either have a self-hosted website or something like AOL Hometown Web pages. This was when “Web Designers” would charge you an arm-and-a-leg for a page and a couple of links. I was okay with the idea that, if I wanted a site that used proper HTML (without proprietary structural markup) and CSS, I had to get an ISP to host my own website. And I had to write all my own HTML & CSS.

Things have changed in the past few years. Even with WordPress.org, I had more freedom to blog without worrying about the coding. When I didn’t have to worry about updating WordPress and editing .htaccess pages and PHP files, it worked great. But I hated it when I would break my site when trying unsuccessfully to upload new versions of the blogging platform software. I thought, “Why can’t it be more like posting content to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, or YouTube? I can’t break those sites. There must be an easier way.”

So I did some searching and found out that I could import my whole site–actually both sites–to WordPress.com, manage both sites from one Dashboard, and port my domain names for only $10 a year per domain. That’s when I decided to move over to the gentler, easier version of WordPress.

Yes, there are limitations. But there are also benefits. And for me, the benefits far outweigh the limitations. I should have moved over a long time ago, because I wasn’t using the advanced options of WordPress.org anyway.

Another reason I moved over is because I’m just enough of a stupid geek to get lost in hours of trying to figure out how to make things work, and I need to stop doing that. The important thing is for me to create content–be it writings, photos, videos, or updates–and publish it easily. So, here’s to my being more creative and less geeky!

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.

On the other hand, I must resist the compulsion to share photos and status updates in order to add value to my experiences. I don’t need to be applauded for being cool or interesting or cultured. I don’t have to be told I have good taste or talent. It feels good, but becoming addicted to acknowledgment leads to a letdown when I don’t get it.

For a year or two now, I’ve debated whether to take my camera on certain adventures. I want to “show the folks back home!” but the equipment weighs me down and cramps my ability to enjoy my own adventure. I told my husband that I was beginning to question whether I could really experience a moment and record it at the same time, and ever since then he tells me, “live the moment, don’t record it.”

I’m not about to stop publishing to social media, but I will continue to remind myself that what matters is not whether people love your life when you’re dead. What matters is that you love your life while you’re living.

I knew this day was coming for the past month or so, so I prepared. I deleted about 1,500 photos that didn’t get many views and probably weren’t very interesting to people. In the process of revising them, I learned that people like photos that tell a story right from the thumbnail and that reward them with satisfaction for clicking on the thumbnail to view the photo because they are special, unique, beautiful, exciting, strange, or otherwise intriguing. I also learned not to post so many versions of the same thing. Usually one is enough. If I’m down to two photos of something now, I force myself to pick one.

Since I have over 5,000 photos, I have created a Collection that I call my Portfolio to give you a look at other Flickrites’ favorites and mine; this Collection contains three sets with 36 images each in the three main types of photograph: Portrait, Landscape, and Still Life. I might play around with the categories in the future, but I plan to keep this set at the top of my home page and rotate photos in and out of it, never exceeding around 100 (or 108, as the case is now).

I appreciate your views. Your views, comments, and faves have taught me a lot about what people want to see. I will still take photos for myself, but now I have a better sense of what interests others.

Since I joined Flickr in August 2006, I have enjoyed meeting people both in my own region and all over the world. Worldwide members of Flickr who have shown me the world through their eyes. Thank you for taking the time to see the world through my eyes.

I got this fortune in a fortune cookie a few weeks ago and carried it around in my wallet. Coincidentally, a story I was commissioned to write for the book eyes of desire 2, a deaf glbt reader was published, and the book came out just last week.

I found this to be an interesting fortune because one usually doesn’t get a fortune this specific. I mean, how many people will become accomplished writers? I suppose many people are accomplished writers in one way or another, but I found especial hope in this fortune for myself.

I’m not particular proud of the story I told in this book– the story of how my first lover was deaf, and how he turned out not to be able to hold adult conversations on a deep level. I was young and naïve, and I didn’t know enough ASL when I first met him to realize that he was incapable of communicating about abstract concepts. I didn’t know what to expect from a deaf person, I didn’t realize how intelligent most deaf people are, and I didn’t even know how to communicate abstract thoughts myself in ASL, so how could I expect him to do so?

My story is not the most bright, cheerful, inspiring, or uplifting story in the book, but it was honest, and it depicts a reality that happened to me, and might happen to others as well. It’s a story I really didn’t want to tell, but I forced myself to, because I had to come to terms with a chapter of my past that haunted me for years. In fact, I often thought that I remained single for so much of my life after that because I was being punished for breaking his heart by leaving him. Who knows? Luckily, I’m long past that now, and have a wonderful marriage with a man I love dearly, a man I truly can talk with about anything and everything. And I still wish the best for my ex, my first lover, the man who gave me the impetus to master ASL and become the interpreter I am today.

I’m creating this as a post on my blog so that people who read the book and look me up through my bio in the book have a space to leave comments on the story. Thanks to Raymond for publishing the story. I welcome your comments.

Please be kind.