Category: Social Media

I Have A Friend

friendI have a friend.  The curious thing is I have no idea who she is.  I’ve never seen her, or spoken to her, or heard her voice.  I think I know her name — Babette — but I’m not sure.  You see, we don’t live in the same country.  We don’t even speak the same language.  Although, she must speak English — I don’t have any Dutch (maybe it’s Dutch?  Google Translator thinks it’s Dutch?)  But in actual fact, I have no facts about my friend whatsoever, except I’m pretty sure she lives on Crete.  The truth is, I only know her because she found me typing away in the digital world and said she liked me.  By chance, I clicked back and discovered I liked her too.  She’s curious.  She sees things many people miss.  She has questions.  Sometimes she has answers.  Yes, sometimes she has an attitude also but she feels life — large and small — and recognizes it for what it is.  And she’s smart and interesting.

So, why, out of the thousands of computer connections I make every day, do I know she’s my friend?  That’s even more curious.

After several weeks of reading and electronically liking each other, she left — disappeared — and unlike all the other random Internet comings and goings, I wondered what happened.  I missed her.  I went looking.  I stood on the edge of the vast cyber wilderness and called her name.  The sound was hollow.  She wasn’t there.  And I felt the loss.

A couple of days ago, my friend showed up again and said she still liked me and explained to her virtual world where she’d been in the real one.  I was glad she was back.  I was excited to see her — happy that my friend had returned.

People seek each other out (we always have.)  It satisfies a need in our psyche and our soul.  These days, the threads that connect us might be as thin as the click of a wireless mouse on a midnight screen half a world away.  But that bond is real.

I don’t know anything about my friend — except I know what she feels.

So, Babette, eat your vegetables, drink some wine, get plenty of sleep, hug the people you love and keep them close.  And if sometime, in the cold, dark soul of 4 o’clock in the morning, you think you’re alone in this world — you’re not — because you are my friend.

When The Mind Wanders!

ideasSome mornings, before the caffeine kicks in, my mind tends to wander.  Here are a few thoughts.  I’ve dressed them up a bit for public consumption and there is a connection here — somewhere — I think.

The F-bomb is not a bomb anymore.  In fact, it’s not even a firecracker.  Once a powerful part of speech, it was used sparingly for shock and emphasis.  Unfortunately, these days it’s so common it’s become nothing more than punctuation.  Suburban moms use it at the spa; the suit and tie boys attempt to play badass with it and high school students wear it on their t-shirts.  However, if you still insist on using it as an adjective, for God’s sake don’t pronounce the “g” — you sound like a middle class moron.  We have different and more powerful naughty words now, and if you want a gasp from the crowd, drop one of those babies into a casual conversation (but be prepared for the Social Media storm — and unemployment.)

Social Media is beyond relentless.  Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and all the rest are like a Pantheon of Greek Gods: ever watching us, picking favourites, interfering, directing our lives, soothing and punishing at their whim.  And we, mere mortals — we — are Sisyphus endlessly toiling to satisfy their will.  It’s like waking up every morning and a couple of thousand people climb out of bed with you, put their shoulders to a boulder and before you know it, there’s this massive cocktail party going on as we all struggle up the hill.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is not a very good movie.  Everybody thinks it is because the first time we saw it we were young and awkward and full of hormones.  Bueller is that confident teen we all wanted to become.  Watch it as an adult and you realize Bueller is actually the asshole kid that always got away with murder.  He’s the one who conned the teacher into extra time on the project that you just pulled an all-nighter for.  The guy who got the girl he didn’t deserve — notably Mia Sara.  And he probably grew up to be a ratbag lawyer (no offence ratbags.)  Incidentally, Matthew Broderick was 24 when he played Bueller and his buddy Cameron, Alan Ruck, was 30.

It’s totally unbelievable how old men always get the hot chicks in the movies.  Check out Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones in Entrapment.  Connery is probably one of the sexiest men who ever walked the planet, but by the time Zeta-Jones came calling, he was nearly 70 and she was barely 29.  Sex is a powerful motivator but there isn’t enough Viagra in the world to make that hookup palatable.

Huffington Post is going to conquer the world.  They’re re-running Randolph Hearst’s winning combination of bad news, snake oil, self-help and boobs and it’s working beyond their wildest expectations.  Not since Hugh Hefner dressed nudity up in a sports jacket and cool-J jazz has a media outlet made such an effective use of soft-core smut.  Try typing NSFW into Huffington Search and you’ll get over 150,000 items in less than a second.  And that doesn’t include all the salacious photos of Paulina Gretzky, Jennifer Lopez, one or more Kardashians, or any other available female.  Then to balance it out, Huffington features a phalanx of bloggers decrying sexism as if nobody ever heard of it before.

One more cup of coffee while I check out Facebook real quick.

Nuns Are Tough!

Monica Almeida NY Times
Monica Almeida NY Times

As our world continues its conversion from God to Celebrity Worship, the nun business isn’t what it used to be.  Contemporary nuns face a couple of serious problems.  First, they are women who keep their clothes on, a group that our society has undervalued for a couple of decades now.  Second, they’re Christians, which leaves them open to relentless, in-your-face ridicule for everything from their habits to their beliefs.  You wanna be a nun these days, sister, you better be tough.

Oddly enough, even as we speak, an epic battle, going on in the San Gabriel Mountains of California, illustrates my point perfectly.  It has become a massive, tangled legal fight which needs more than one google to understand — but here’s the quick and dirty version.

A couple of years ago, the Catholic Church in California decided to sell one of its convents.  They were approached by a Katherine Hudson who offered them $14.5 million for it.  It turns out  Katherine Hudson is actually Katy Perry, and Ms. Perry thought a convent (coincidentally, with a spectacular view of Hollywood and the San Gabriel Mountains) would be a totally cool place to live and “find herself.” (It seems Ms. Perry is quite spiritual: she has “Jesus” tattooed on her wrist.)  Unfortunately, a couple of the Holy Sisters from the convent caught Ms. Perry’s act on YouTube, and being very old nuns, were shocked, somewhat amazed and just about as upset as any nun can get.  They cancelled the sale.  Instead, they decided to sell their convent to Ms. Dana Hollister, a restaurateur.

Here’s where it gets hazy.

Apparently, undaunted by a couple of antique nuns, Ms. Perry and her legal people went back to the Archdiocese and politely asked “WTF?”  (FYI, Katy Perry isn’t afraid of anything: she was once married to Russell Brand.)  At this point, the Catholic big boys — particularly His Grace Jose Gomez, Archbishop of Los Angeles — tried to talk some sense into the two little old ladies.  According to him, nuns have no right to sell anything.  In fact, it doesn’t even matter that the Sisters of the Most Holy and Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary owned the property in the first place because, ultimately, it belongs to the Catholic Church (i.e. the Pope.)  Therefore, it will be he, His Grace Jose Gomez, Archbishop of Los Angeles, as The Pope’s representative, who will decide what’s in everybody’s best interests, thank you very much.  Normally, that would have been an end to it, but Sisters Katherine Rose and Rita (86 and 77, respectively) didn’t back down.  They don’t want anybody’s “teenage dream in skinny jeans” strutting around their convent as if she owned the place.  They told His Grace Jose Gomez, Archbishop of Los Angeles, in no uncertain terms, that he can yip all he wants about The Pope because — come prayer time — they would be talking to his boss.

The archdiocese, caught between a rock and (what the nuns were calling) a hot place, lawyered up.  They’re now suing Dana Hollister on the grounds that she can’t legally buy anything from nuns — although Katherine Hudson (aka Katy Perry) can buy whatever she wants from pumped-up priests.

The story’s not over, but personally, I think for $14.5 million, Katy Perry can find some other place to “find herself.” After all, she made that money telling women to follow their hearts and do what they believe in — no matter what.