Can We Not Make This All About You?

I spent the month of March not posting on Facebook. This was one of a few “monthly resolutions” I made for March. (I try each month to come up with a goal or practice or change to act on, just to stay conscious, mix things up, and avoid routines).


I planned to simply take a break from posting food pics and political memes in order to focus on some higher aspirations related to languishing to-dos and meditative introspection. All in all, it has gone quite well. I’ve only had a couple of occasions where I felt the angst of being constrained from posting a cool photo, something inspirational, or a humorous observation of one kind or another.




Ironically, this preceded the recent news and backlash around “Cambridge Analytica”, the granularity of data available to Facebook business clients, and the whole #deleteFacebook movement. (It's nice being ahead of the curve for once.)


But I’m not going to stop using Facebook. Facebook is the most effective mass-communication platform in the world. Its reach is unfathomable. I won’t abandon it any more than I’d have stopped using a credit-card in the days of “carbon-copy” paranoia, or that I’d stop flying after a plane crashed, or that I feel a need to cover my MacBook’s built-in camera. It’s extreme. It’s not a logical response. Social media and sites of this nature are absolutely here to stay. At least for my lifetime, that’s for sure. It might not always be Facebook, but there will always be a dominant platform for social interaction from her forward.


I am, however, resigned to changing HOW I use it.


My recent “resolution” effort had already caused me to rethink the FB platform, along with my parallel efforts to revive my writing and blogging activities. In addition to that, my recent readings of and listening to books and articles and podcasts that are all focused on mindfulness, awareness, history, humanity and the connections we share that must be our highest priority if we’re to evolve as a species... well, it all drove home for me the very simple premise that extends perfectly to social media…. It’s not all about me. And it’s not all about you.


I was an avid blogger for several years. My personal website was where I published everything… photos, jokes, movie reviews, personal insights I wanted to capture, perspectives I wanted to leave behind for posterity, all of it. I tapered off for some time, and I gradually found myself using Facebook as the dominant spot to do these same things. But with much less openness and honesty.


I’ve come to realize that I want my space back. (No, not “mySpace”… nobody wants that back.) I want my “personal space” back. A space dedicated to the light things, the little things, the simple things. I also want a space for the deeper things, the personal things, the intimate stuff I want to be brave enough to say and share with my friends, but perhaps not for my kids just yet, or colleagues. So, I now have two websites. One light, one heavy. One surface chatter, the other, memoirs and personal expression.


With those two bases covered, what is Facebook good for? Well, I for one want to use “social media” to effect “social change”, for social good. I don’t intend to use it anymore for stuff that’s about me. I want to use it for stuff that’s about US. US as people. US as societies. Social, political, inspirational, thought-provoking, uplifting… anything that might do us ALL some good.


We have a business relationship with Facebook at the company I work at, and we recently went to visit them for a business meeting. One of the things I have loved and leveraged since my first visit to their offices some 8+ years ago are the posters they’d put throughout to inspire, motivate, and promote a mindset of engagement and contribution. I even made a set of my own based on them at my company when I first started there. So when we visited them in January we got a campus tour. While on the tour we got to stop at the print shop on campus and we were allowed to take some posters and postcards with us, I took several, one of which is the image attached to this post. “Build Social Value”. That’s now my goal, too.

…And I Am You And What I See Is Me

As I was driving this morning, I noticed a car idling on the side of the street. I glanced in the window at the driver, and it looked like they were sobbing. We should all carry a connection to everybody around us. We need to have a constant baseline presence and empathy in our daily exchanges. Not one enabling dysfunction, just simple consideration of each of our individual circumstances. Everybody has their own dramas, strains and frustrations. As well as their joys, inspirations, and sources of happiness. The more I consider this, the more I want to stay connected to the moment. Not what has happened, not what might happen, but what is happening. And without judgment or consideration of how it came about or what the impact could be later.

My Father’s Pen

When my father passed away, he’d remarried and had been working and living in Frankfurt, Germany. Most of his possessions and much of my childhood history either went into a storage facility behind Apple’s VG6 building where I later worked, or with him to Germany in the initial move or during the following years as he would visit stateside.



Very few of his positions remained at the house we’d grown up in, and after he’d passed away, I found myself wanting something, anything, of historical and personal significance. We’d completely forgotten about the storage locker. It likely got auctioned off, forgotten and left dormant, and somewhere in Silicon Valley, there’s some precious audio and technical artifacts in somebody else’s possession. Although my brother was given the Jose Grant puzzle wedding band he’d worn before his death, I was lacking something tangible and physical, left seeking something that was definitely ‘his’, too, that I could hold in my hand.



My dad loved using fountain pens. I never ‘got it’, it seemed messy, complicated and a lot of work compared to a simple Bic or a handful of "Mercury Savings" freebee click-pens that also doubled as spring loaded "guns" if you knew how to rework them. But he loved a good fountain pen, he used them constantly, and one pen, in particular, was iconic and consistently clipped to his shirt pocket. A Parker fountain pen. It sat with his keys and wallet and coins each night, routinely carried daily much like I carry my iPhone. It was an essential component of his attire and daily routine.



I don’t know how or why it was at the house and not with him when he passed away. I don’t recall if it was given to us when we went to his funeral. I honestly don’t recall much of that whole experience, it’s a painfully blurry period I seem to have sleep-walked through. On more than one occasion my brother reminds me of an incident I have absolutely no recollection of. But one way or another, I ended up getting that pen, and it’s been in my possession ever since. I’ve kept it in a box of very treasured mementos, including the hospital identification band I’d worn on the 1st day of my life. And that pen means more than anything else in it.



While working this week to revive my private blog, I started to rethink it's ‘header’ image options. This fed into my realization that, for that more segregated and personal site, as much as I loved the pixelated ’90’s header I’d painstakingly crafted from “BeOS” icons during my earliest days of blogging, that site had evolved over time, and was not well represented by the header image. I wanted to replace it with something more relative of the introspective nature of my use of that site today. I wanted to own that effort and intention fully, with a visual reminder of the preciousness that personal thought and reflection, memories, and something as simple as a fountain pen can represent in retrospect.



So, here it is. Tarnished and treasured…. my father’s Parker fountain pen.

I hope I can live up to the emotional legacy it represents to me.

From this day on I own my father's gun.
We dug his shallow grave beneath the sun.
I laid his broken body down below the Southern land,
It wouldn't do to bury him where any Yankee stands.

I'll take my horse and I'll ride the northern plain.
To wear the color of the greys and join the fight again.
I'll not rest until I know the cause is fought and won.
From this day on until I die I'll wear my father's gun.

- “My Father’s Gun” - Elton John/Bernie Taupin

Idle Time for Java

The coffee I stuck in the microwave to warm, for 2min…. something I did around 10.30am… well that microwave is still beeping to tell me that it's done. It's 1pm. That's been my morning. This is what 'work' entails.

A Lifetime of Zen

I just finished watching "The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling" and the tears are still flowing. This was an incredible insight into not just a career, but into the depth of one man's search for meaning, peace, resolution, and above all, honesty. There are so many things here I never knew or would expect to have known, but now that I do, I feel somewhat validated and inspired in my own quest for insight and awareness. It makes me want to write more frequently and more honestly, too.





This was beautiful, genuine, humane, insightful, inspiring, heartbreaking, life-affirming, centering, focusing, angst-ridden, and joyous. One of the best of many of his insightful comments came towards the end of the film and his life... "I can be funny at the drop of a hat. Except that sometimes, you can’t find a hat."

Trailer

Slow Grade Ascent

I love my kids more than I ever imagined I could. And yet I also have a responsibility to be firm and resolute when it comes to school and grades and putting efforts into assignments. They're both fully capable of being A & B students with very little effort. But very little effort is what's being made to achieve and maintain those grades. Although I've no belief that middle school grades will carry forward, as I tried to tell my son last night while discussing his going to tutoring in the mornings in order to get so low grades back up, the routines and practices he's establishing today will carry forward. And the path that leads him to be a success in his adult life is being paved today.


He was adamantly against going to tutoring when I dropped him off. He argued it intensely. And I stayed calm until I left. Only to have him call me 5 min later refusing to go and saying it we didn't agree to it. So I told him it's not his choice, as his parent this is my direction to him, he has to do it, and until his grades are all back on an acceptable level, anything/everything that's a 'privilege' is off the table. Snowboarding, screens, having friends over… all of it. Because he's refusing, he's losing. By turning it around, he'll gain higher ground.

He hung up on me. Where he got this defiant attitude is beyond me. :-/

I am trying to balance my role and my responsibility with the awareness of my own experiences of the same kind re. academics in middle/high school. I didn't make efforts, nobody pushed me to, and I regret it now. I want them both to succeed in ways that I did not. But I would not have been easily convinced t make more efforts then, either.

Parenting is hard. I have to keep reminding myself that there will be a point at which it's reflected on and hopefully appreciated, just like kids that become musicians reflect on having hated been forced to learn an instrument.

Curb Appeal

I'm on the precipice of a return to writing far more frequently - and I feel the shift of balance occurring too. I feel wobbly. It reminds me of that fraction of a second where you realize as you're riding a bicycle that you've come to the edge of the curb and you have to fall one way or the other to retain control before you crash.

A Moment of Disconnection

Nothing strains my efforts to maintain my perspective and keep a calm demeanor like a 14-year-old son with an iPhone and some technical prowess.

I spend more time these days than I have my whole life just trying to be mindful, non-reactive, introspective and to keep my awareness of the futility of the little annoyances in perspective. And then he goes and removes the ‘OurPact’ device management on his phone in response to it automatically going into restricted mode after 10pm.

He called me about it last night at 10.02pm, with his typical tone of irritation and resentment. He was pissed off because it shuts off the camera, which it does because I set it up to turn off FaceTime and the OurPact team is unable to change that, technically, it seems. I wrote to them about it and confirmed a while back. I even installed and tested some 3rd party camera options and confirmed there’s no obvious workaround. So when I got the call I said he’d have to wait until tomorrow and instead, he uninstalled the device management, which in turn overrides the settings. It’s a known risk of the product and the OurPact people sent me an alert immediately.

Snailed it!

I noticed my son taking a photo of a snail the other morning. I thought it was just a photo of a flower, a lily outside the house, but I later went out and found there was a snail therein. So I popped on my macro lens, took about 30 photos, and this was the best. I never realized how "gelatinous" a snail's head is.

Crime Seen

My appearance on this recent ski trip prompted my son to tell me that I look like a criminal. I'm just getting ready to audition for Pesci's roll in the 2018 remake of "Home Alone".

Tuning Out: A Playlist and Parting Words

It was around 7 years ago, if memory serves me well, that my ex-wife's friend, a neighbor just two houses up the street, stood in our dining room and asked us what three songs we'd want to be played at my funeral. It was just one of those random 'conversational' questions, the sort that you might expect to find on a random party game card, or uttered by Bob Eubanks. But it resonated and has stuck in my mind since.

I'd already had the answers consciously tucked away in the 3.5" index card file of my mind. I knew what they were. And for future reference, hopefully, long-future reference, I'm capturing them here and asking that any/all of my friends and family that might survive me ensure they are honored.

I'll not attempt to explain the choices. I'll leave it to interpretation.

• The Wind by Cat Stevens
• Do You Realize? by The Flaming Lips
• The Great Gig In The Sky by Pink Floyd
• Your Life Is Now by John Mellencamp

Also, upon my death, I would like the following wishes to be respected and executed.

If there is a use for any organ transplants, start there. Then it's up to my surviving partner, friend Matt C,  or my mother, then my kids if they're 18+, then my brother, to make further decisions about what happens to what's left. My preference would be a 'green burial' wherein I'm returned to the earth in a natural fashion without such wasteful things as a casket or any other funeral-industry fan-fare and billing. I had wanted once to be cremated but as I think it over, it's wasteful. I'd rather be reabsorbed from whence I came.

My Final Words (written July 23, 1998 and valid to this day)

I understand this is a time of mourning and of loss, but it's also a time to feel joy. We're all going to die, but we don't all get the chance to experience love and friendships.

Think of these good things; that we did have time together, did know each other, and hopefully made each other's time here something special. 

My desires for any 'memorial' would be a casual gathering in my remembrance, perhaps a big potluck BBQ of my favorite foods, outdoors if possible, or taking over a big room in a casual pizza parlor or a friend's home, where everybody can wander and talk to everybody else.

Share stories, photos and anything else you have that reminds you of me or something we shared. Support and uplift each other. Mingle, greet old friends, meet and make new ones. I ask you to recognize that this is a natural stage of life, that I am as sad as you that we are apart but equally glad that you're here, and that we had a valued relationship. Use this experience to start a habit of consciously recognizing that each day you awake may be your last, and live that day as if it were.

- Geoff