MS Paint Presents: MENC's Finest

So, I took a little trip this last week...

We went to In-Service Conference and had us a big time!

We opened the festivities properly, with our pilgrimage to Vinnie Van's.

We attended some fine reading sessions and learned about the dot-based social hierarchy.

We discovered that Jenna has supernatural boy-drawing powers.

We bonded over a truly, er, unique film.

And then I got tired of drawing Paint pictures and decided to sum-um-up.

On Identity: The Unified Self vs. The Mosaic Self

"Identity" is a complicated word.  I can't speak for other cultures, but I know that 'round here, we like to categorize and label.  It gives us the illusion of control.  I've heard in more than one context about our tendency to respond to "Who am I?" with our occupation.  Even on the "About" page on this here blog, I list lots of characteristics, occupations, etc. that people associate with me.  I'm a Christian, a musician, so on.  But lately, I've been thinking about the nature of how we perceive people and how we, especially in the South, believe in this virtue of Personal Consistency.  Is not one of the political right's favorite insults "flip-flopper?"  If you choose to change your lifestyle or behavior for reasons deemed Insufficient by whomever is speaking, you are flaky.  Those choosing to be tactful ("bless your heart") might call you "free-spirited" or "open-minded."  But they mean the same thing: "You used to be one way and now you are a different way and I dislike change because it busts up my illusion of control and instead of examining my own hang-ups, I am going to label you Immature or Flighty or Shallow.  Away from me, Changeling!"  And then there's the virtue of Purism, which says that if you claim to be something, you'd better be in line with the ideals of that Something every moment.  Prime example: in college, a fellow musician once berated me for openly admitting that in my free time, I usually don't listen to classical music.  I hath violated the Sacred Guidelines for Real Dadgum Musicians...and yet, still knew my stuff, still got my degree.

I wonder how different things would be if we took a different view of people.  Rather than thinking of them as pillars, held up by the virtues of their jobs, hobbies, skills, etc...

we saw them as mosaics.  Each little job, each new book we read, each friend we make, all become pieces of our mosaics.  And sometimes, those pieces might seem like opposites, but I think the inclusion of opposed pieces makes us richer, more empathetic people.  Take a couple of my favorite authors: Lewis Grizzard and Garrison Keillor.  Different beliefs, very different political leanings, different experiences.  And when I sit down to ponder a slice of life, I can anticipate what either of them would say and I'm a better person for it.  Who wants a mosaic that's all one color?  Who wants to be so completely absorbed by one viewpoint, one type of experience, one understanding of the world?  None of the pieces completely defines you, because nothing we pursue on this earth can do that.  I have skills and pursuits, but I don't spend every minute of every day being A Musician, A Teacher, A Smart.

In re-reading that paragraph, I realize that I am inviting an argument about my specific religion, because Christianity and most spiritual pursuits cover and permeate the life of the adherent.  I think that God operates outside the mosaic and that He encourages it, and that the more we understand about humanity in all its colors and variety, the more we can do to improve it.  During any sermon regarding evangelism, my pastor always points out that it is possible to grow up in a Christian home, attend a Christian school, attend a Christian college or seminary, make a living in a Christian organization like a church or philanthropic nonprofit and never really impact someone else's life.  The monochromatic mosaic is not an edifying force for our faith, but rather a stifling one.

So yeah, I can name chords and list composer dates and principal works and analyze sonatas.  I also listen to Ke$ha.  I use words like "monochromatic" and "adherent."  I also use words like "dagnabbit" and "holla."  I watch documentaries about WWII and film history and classroom indoctrination.  I also watch Ren and Stimpy.  I hate spiders.  I considered binding a live spider to a headband and wearing it for Halloween.  I fear death.  I am fascinated by macabre subject matter and will spend hours on Wikipedia reading about the deadliest air disasters in history.  I want to dye my hair red and wear it flipped out with a plaid skirt.  I want to dye my hair black and get a nose ring.  I want to be a conductor.  I want to be a rock star.

All little pieces, all of them make me.  

The High School, The Sixteen, The Sophomore Year

The real genius behind blogging is that it gives you an opportunity to say to the world, "Does anyone else do this?" and there's a possibility that you'll meet scores of people who do exactly that.

Did you ever get an entire year of your life stuck in your head?   Because as of late, I have had frequent occasion to recall my sophomore year of high school.  I think this is due to several things:
1. The rediscovery and subsequent downloading-to-the-iPod of several tracks from the Moulin Rouge soundtrack.
2. The fact that two pieces from that year's All-State have resurfaced in my life, one in my class and the other in my student's All-State repertoire.
3. The singing of the old songs in worship, many of which I discovered during that year.

It has just occurred to me that those are all music-related points.  Hm.  I've heard that smell is the sense that links to memory the fastest and the most effectively because (paraphrasing from various sources I can't be bothered to cite right now), it goes to the memory part of your brain before going to the part of your brain that says, "What is this?"  But for me, music can put me back in a place as well, especially music that has lain dormant in my brain for a while.  When I snagged the MR soundtrack from Mom's house a few weeks ago and listened to their rendition of "Your Song," I was immediately back in my old bedroom, pacing around, imagining that the young gentleman I was dating at the time was making grand and elaborate romantic gestures.

When I think about tenth grade, it comes in quick little clips.  Standing on the back row in Chorus next to Sara and Ashlyn singing the Pitoni "Cantate Domino.)  Spending hours on AIM with the young gentleman I was dating, only to find him quiet and withdrawn in person (really???  A 16-yr-old boy wasn't just brimming with conversation?)  The pretty girls in Chorus giving me a makeover and Doc informing me that they made me look, erm, meretricious.  Writing up scripts for pretend television shows. 

Sitting in Physical Science making jokes with Jon, starting a friendship of epic proportions.  Listening to soundtracks over and over and over and imagining every dance move, outlining every voice part in my brain.  Writing parodies upon parodies.  Wondering why Coach B had such a great reputation.  Bethany, Rebecca, Ashlyn, Sara, Deanna, Elena, Jenny, Meggie, Jon, Andrew, Stephen, Ryan, Marc, Justin, Curtis.

I dated, got dumped rather spectacularly ("I would date you, but I'm afraid of what people would think of me..."), dated someone else, found him unenthusiastic about the whole thing, dumped him unspectacularly, re-dated him because I thought no one else would ever like me enough to date me, found him downright mean and re-dumped him with what Doc called a "cerebral hate letter."  (Lest I be accused of soiling these unnamed fellows' reputations, I would like to add here that both apologized and more than made up for their conduct and have since been pleasantly civil to me and great suitors to subsequent girlfriends.)

Mostly, I remember that year as being a year of extremes.  I decided to try to eschew sugar one day and found myself eating 6 bowls of HoneyComb the next day.  Boy du Jour would hold my hand for two seconds and I would be over the moon, dancing down the hallways, only to be despondent an hour later when he wouldn't even say hi to me because he was around his friends.  I was desperate for approval (in other news, water is wet) and any little speck, from a good grade on a test to a friend saying I was a good writer sent me skyward, whereas any hint of rejection or disapproval sent me into a self-hate spiral.

Now, what's funny is...I remember it as being one of the best years of my teenagerhood.  It wasn't the happiest year, but it feels like the year I lived the most as a kid, in a manner of speaking.  I ran unabashedly toward what I wanted, exulted to the heavens when I got it and crashed into sorrow when I didn't.  I used to think that songs like "Need You Now" with lines that said "I'd rather hurt than feel nothing at all" didn't make sense because, really, who wants pain?  But my 11th grade year, which was generally a more pleasant year, doesn't feel to me like a better year.  I think back on it and it feels beige.  It feels oatmeal.  Whereas 10th grade is (speaking strictly metaphorically) a series of emotional parties and hangovers.  10th grade is bright colors and big music, poison and panacea, trying to sort out what among my personality traits were to be embraced as me-isms and what were blemishes that needed immediate removal.  As you can imagine, anything that really could be called a personality trait made the latter list, whereas skill traits like verbal intelligence made the former. 

I think the last thing that really made 10th grade the best year was that the full self-control psychosis hadn't descended on me just yet.  Although I was getting close, it wasn't until just after that I extrapolated that having and expressing emotions was bad bad bad because it made me sensitive and sensitive means that I am weak and undeserving of respect or validation until I get that crap under control.  So often when we think back to fun childhood times, we wished we had savored the moment more, worried less, blah blah blah.  But I don't feel that way about 10th grade.  I was in it at full speed the whole time.  It was a great big year.

Leisure Time with Ashley

 

Sitting in front of space heater, listening to Sports Night on YouTube, putting together a puzzle.

This is pretty much what my Snow Sabbatical looked like.

Snow Day II: Snowier

 

We open our portrait gallery with a shot of the front yard this morning from my front window.

Allow me to translate this portrait for you:

 

So, yeah.  Between the obscured driveway and the big ol' hill, I am certainly not going anywhere today.

 

A sample footprint, roughly three inches deep.

 

Remember the brick outline photo?  This is the same spot taken from about the same angle...

 

Our frozen fishy pond in the back yard!

 

Red inedible berries frosted over.

 

My little scarecrow, still sitting there since early October.

 

My masterpiece: Medium Snowman Whelchel and his Snow Piano!

 

A close-up of Medium Snowman Whelchel.  You can see the lines where I carved him out of a big ol' pile of snow.

 

The Snow Piano, with pine needles and leaves painstakingly placed to mimic piano keys :)

 

Making a statement to anyone who would wish to advertise on my car.

 

Making a statement to anyone who would doubt Andrew's essential flyness.

Death By Commentariat

I always jump on bandwagons way after everyone else.  I think this is a lingering tendency carried from childhood; I was an awkward freak who would never fit in with the popular kids, so I eschewed everything the popular kids liked so that I could attribute my social isolation to my own voluntary choice rather than my involuntary strange personality.  Now that the popular kids are gone (replaced in my psyche by an even scarier archnemesis: expectations), my resistance to everything cool is merely another quirk in the haystack.  I didn't start watching Bones until 5 years into the show.  I didn't start going to Starbucks until many years after the cup stopped being a status symbol.  I didn't frequent YouTube until Rhett and Link had already posted many a vid.

So as of late, I've had some really cool blogs in my reader written by smart, articulate, funny women.  I'm refraining from linking because I don't want my blog to show up on their trackbacks and their authors be like, "Who is this clown?"  If you're curious, holler at me.

The thing is, there's been a phenomenon here lately of trolls suddenly growing in number and in nastiness.  I arrive at this conclusion because 3 of my favorite blogs have dealt publicly with being struck with an influx of trolling, as well as an influx of comments in general, good and bad.  One of them, for several reasons including abusive commentary, closed its doors completely.  Another turned off comments.  The third very bravely dealt with the problem publicly, practically liveblogging every moment from being frightened to leave her house because of a large volume of threats to resolving not to let them win and going right on being awesome. 

Who are these people, the trolls?  I started this entry thinking I would arrive at a thesis, but then I remembered that College, It Is Over and I don't have to have my mind made up.  The Wikipedia entry I link to gives a pretty specific definition of trolls as Puckish troublemakers, but the term is typically used more widely to apply to people who make you go, "Really?  An ostensibly sentient being said that?"  There are some who make their comments with great effort, measured tone and correct grammar.  They really believe in what they're saying.  And when what they're saying is crap like claiming that a rape victim is lying about the rape or advocating segregation as a remedy for crime in my little hometown, well, it doth confuse me.  I know it's probably more revealing about my prejudices that I take clear verbal communication as a sign of intelligence, but come on.  You have enough education to spell.  You have enough skills to form a "logical" (by which I mean one sentence clearly follows another - not describing the argument being made) paragraph.  So how do you live and exist among people and not realize that what you're saying is so fundamentally hurtful and wrongheaded?


The other big issue I have with commenters of the second species rather springboards off my last post about internet interaction: what exactly do they think they're accomplishing?  I remember my Secondary Methods teacher explaining to us that teens are constantly thinking about themselves and how they are perceived: "Am I ok?  Do I look weird?  Is this a cool thing to do or will it make people think I'm stupid?"  Yet it never occurs to them that unless they run through the halls hollering, "FIRE!" or something equally extreme, much of what they do will pass unnoticed because every other teen is worried about him/herself too.  I think this also applies to the trolls: they somehow think that their little blurb is going to be a sudden AHA moment for the author, when the author's longer, better supported, better stated position obviously wasn't enough to sway the troll.  Us people, we are stupid sometimes.


So.  All that to say that I'm really mad that a bunch of losers are descending on people I admire and making their lives difficult.  I'd like to go up to those people in person and watch their heads go splodey while I very calmly pose these questions to them.  Then again, I'd probably end up with either a Bad Girls Club-esque smackdown aimed at me or a growled threat to get off somebody's lawn. 

The Armchair Psychology of Facebook

I read a piece by the stellar Sady Doyle on how everyone is crafting public personas now, thanks to Facebook, Twitter, et al.  What really gets me is the dichotomy of the public persona for people who aren't Snooki or Lady Gaga.  The allure of Twitter and Facebook updates and i-ate-cereal-today (apologies to Kate Harding and Al Iverson) blogs is that by allowing brief blurbs and semi-anonymous ramblings to cross our computers, we're somehow letting more and more of the words that happen in our head happen in public.  Proof: my last Facebook post:

Flash back to, say, 20 or so years ago.  If I had this same PROFOUND THOUGHT (and were still 24 as opposed to 4), I might at most call ACon and tell her about it.  Now?  Just about every acquaintance I have knows that I drank pineapple-flavored Mexican soda today.

The stream of online drivel creates a secondhand intimacy gained by little to no effort.  Before all this connectedness, if you wanted to be a friend close enough to be privy to these little jewels of insanity, you had to (1) meet me in person, (2) do so on a regular basis, (3) demonstrate through these interactions that you are not a jerk, (4) be compatible with me by virtue of shared interests and strengths, and (5) maintain a quid pro quo by revealing more and more of your actual self as I do the same.  It is organic and it takes years.  Nowadays, I have Facebook friends that I've never actually met in person; if we were to meet, that person could come to the table with extensive knowledge of how my brain works.  Like a FastPass to friendship.  The odd thing is, it doesn't seem to work that way for me.  I have a buddy who I knew through other people and good old Facebook before getting to spend any time with her in person.  When I really did get to spend time with her in person, I figured we'd have an easy time of it because we already knew a lot about each other.

...nope.  Still had lots of awkward silences toward the beginning of the conversation, still hunted-and-pecked for topics, still nosed around for that perfect springboard that would send us into meaningful interaction.

And there's the rub: we think that we're getting to know people at a safe distance through text-based communication like Facebook, Twitter and texting, but that very distance and the nature of written composition as opposed to face-to-face speech disconnects the "true" self from the cyberself.  And no matter how open you try to be over these various media, it will always be a different you than the in-person you.  Yes, I know, "the pen must at length comply with the tongue," but it doesn't.  I'm by no means lamenting the presence and influence of social networking--I love being able to see other people's random thoughts and pictures of their pets--I'm just having trouble reconciling the perceived depth of interaction online with the amount of time and effort it takes to achieve that same depth in-person, regardless of whether you "friended" them or not.

And there's no reason I should be having trouble with that concept, because I saw it happen time and again as a dating teenager.  Lemme tell ya, I was all about some AOL Instant Messenger as a teen, because the pressure was off.  I had time to craft my responses and *dazzle* my suitors with such gems as "Banana peels really aren't that slippery at all."  And those gentlemen were afforded the same advantage, which for them typically yielded sentences like, "i guess thats cool."  What happened when we went on a for-reals date?  The same thing that happens on countless for-reals dates...glorious unabashed gaucheitude.  Because the difference between how I state an idea in writing...


"My new phone is more convenient because its charger doubles as a USB cable"

and how I state it in spoken words

"My phone has this thing [flips cover off charging port] and you can, um, use the charger [points to charger] as a USB cord."

are worlds apart.  I had to pretend someone was sitting next to me and say that sentence aloud to even get it right--I can't even approximate my spoken speech on the computer.  There's a simple explanation that lies at the heart of this whole thing:

Typing takes longer than speaking, no matter how fast you type.

So even if you don't want to, even if you're really trying to be as transparent online or in text as possible, you can't really do it convincingly because the sentence springs from your brain fully formed, but morphs and changes as you type.  By the time you get to the halfway point of the sentence, you've probably already forgotten the original way it bounced out of your head.  It's your internal censor, which still operates in you even at your most relaxed and informal--it helps keep your communication coherent.  In speech, this happens when you have pauses in your sentences or use stalling syllables like "um."  You're giving yourself time to figure out how to clearly convey the idea to the listener.  You get the embryo of a thought and your brain starts buzzing, feeding you synonyms for words you aren't sure about using, informing your grammatical structure, and for most of us ladies, connecting it to eighteen other thoughts and images at the same time that you might use to enrich the thought you're in the middle of verbalizing.

The other big factor is that in text-based cyber communication, there are limits.  Not so much in blogs (as evidenced by this here entry), but especially on Twitter and in most Facebook applications.  You have to use verbal  frugality because 140 characters dries up fast.  Which means that those celebrities you're following aren't necessarily giving you a glimpse of their true selves just because they tweet, "I make awesome decisions in bike stores." (Kanye West)

So I guess what I'm trying to say in all this is that Sady is right and that the concept she's illustrating stretches even to those who aren't actively trying to censor their Facebook/Twitter out of career concerns or vanity.  Any text-based communication, open and honest though it may be, will by its very nature be a more polished version of the original speaker.  So when we tell casual acquaintances to Facebook us because we think it will take the awkward out of superficial social interaction, we are wrong.  As soon as we get face-to-face again, we'll return to wherever we were in that organic friend-making process, regardless of text-based interactions.  Which is why all the whining about texting and Facebook turning us into hermits is total crap.  We still need people, and it still takes genuine effort and vulnerability to get people.

Full disclosure: I don't have a Twitter account.  But I do regularly check the Twitter accounts of my favorite writers and celebrities.

Resolution? Not so much.

We're two hours into 2011 and in that time, I have...

-Wished my husband a happy new year

-Rocked out to a little Happy New Year music

-Straightened up the kitchen and den (we moved a table into the center of the den for our New Year's Eve dinner, so I needed to move it back)

-Packed up all the Christmas decorations into boxes

-Put the tree back into its box

-Put all the Christmas boxes into the storage closet

The only reason I haven't put our living room (seasonal residence for the tree) back to its original layout is because our couch and loveseat are too big for me to move by myself.  Business as usual in the 'leven, yes ma'am...