Daniel Greene

Tag: thoughts

Personal reflections on myself and other people— introspection, examination, reflections, musings, contemplations, examinations, probing— feelings you can probably relate to

  • The unacknowledged life is still worth living

    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.

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  • Flying the Rainbow Flag with Pride

    Flying the Rainbow Flag with Pride

    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! 🙂

  • I thought I was a social outcast. Then I came to my senses.

    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… (more…)

  • How do you define success?

    I wrote the other day Am I a winner… or a loser? I wasn’t really asking the world; I was asking myself.

    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: (more…)

  • Am I a winner… or a loser?

    A recurring theme in my life has been that I feel like a loser. Then again, sometimes I feel like a winner. In order to get a grasp on this, and come clean about feeling like a loser, I am determined to sit down and write it out.

    In some of my early childhood memories, I remember being cursed with a sort of social awkwardness that made me feel like a loser, or perhaps more correctly, I did things that people responded to by saying things that I interpreted as, “what a loser!”

    There is no Mrs. Coffee

    There was the first day of kindergarten, when I thought one of our teachers had identified herself as Mrs. Coffee. I don’t know remember what I wanted to ask her, but I remember raising my hand and saying, “Mrs. Coffee!” over and over again and getting no response, until finally a girl sitting near me glared at me with her precocious little five-year-old venom and said, “There is no ‘Mrs. Coffee.’” I felt like an idiot not only for mishearing the teacher’s name, but for sticking my neck out by raising my hand and calling it repeatedly.

    You lost the game for us!

    There was that time… (more…)