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February
February is mostly endurance till reading week, that first big assignment, that mid-term quiz, that overwhelming never-ending mass of marking. It is also usually cold and dark.
But this February is bright blue, stained glass mornings. It is hot soup, dragon lights, and full moons. It asks questions, and sometimes, it gets an answer. It is an accumulation of empty seats. It is time to stop and re-quest.
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January
January is another September: new term, new students, new schedule. January is adjustments and expectations: 3-hour classes, 6:40 am subway rides, photocopier breakdowns, overheated claustrophobic rooms.
But January is also graffiti on a garage wall — and a word to consider. It is a brilliant orange-pink night; it is some time with poetry. It is a Santa head dangling from a railing. It is a pair of feet checking out new ground.
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A Year In Pictures
2011 was about seeing new places, chasing Toronto’s sunsets, and getting reunited with the GO Transit system. It was a Last Call, a karaoke song, a shadow, a scene in a window, a 5 o’clock New York moon, a runner’s exaltation, a ride amongst lights, a fleeting heroine, a painting to enter, and all those birds rushing the sky.
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The Facebook Playground
Sometimes it’s like I’ve not grown up. I still get nervous talking to adults. I wear Converse to the college English classes I teach. And I daydream in excessive bursts. Sometimes that daydream comes on the subway, when the time of day is still waking, and people look fresh but miserable, and hold thick slabs of newsprint that contain blurbs about the economy or Toronto’s streets. What I daydream is me, singing my way from train car to train car. I wonder what it would feel like to do that. I wonder what all the fresh and miserable people would do.
Too, I still worry about people being mad at me. I hate when people are mad at me. When I was a pre-teen, I worried about this all the time. It was like an obsession. I took every simple, unconscious gesture of any friend — eye roll, raised eyebrow, pursed lip — as anger directed only at me. I never knew what I had done, but I worried over what I might do, or say, or incite. And because I feared being hated, I’d write notes to this girl and that girl desperate to know the answer to the inevitable question, “Are you mad at me?” or, “Did I do something wrong?”
Thankfully, I don’t send “Are you mad at me?” notes to anyone anymore. I have learned, over time, that some friendships change, some persevere, some are easy, and some die out. These are lessons most of us learn. And yet despite those lessons, I find myself sometimes questioning the role Facebook now plays in my friendships. To me, Facebook has changed the face, the feel, the definition, the very nature of friendship. This is something I have been thinking a lot about recently, as I consider not only my participation on Facebook, but my lack of participation on Facebook.
When I first joined Facebook, I thought little of it. That is, until certain people from my past started “friending” me. Initially, I was reticent; I wasn’t sure what re-establishing contact after so many years might mean. That part of my life was over. Up until Facebook, I merely mused about what those people were doing now. What were their lives like? Were they living in some far-off place doing something I never would have thought? Suddenly, I didn’t have to wonder anymore, because there they were: wedding pictures, baby pictures, vacation pictures. Here they were, in the present. In other words, the mystery was gone.
And here’s where I got confused. Were we still, technically, “friends”? Or, does the passage of time erode that term? We were once friends. What are we now? I suppose I thought too much about this at the start, and eventually, I gave in to the idea that being in touch with people from the past was neat. And, so, my roster of Facebook friends grew over time, to include writer friends, comedy friends, and, eventually, grad school friends. Once my number of friends hit about 180, I peaked. It has fluctuated ever since. Every once in a while I gain a friend; then, I notice, I lose a friend. Maybe someone goes off Facebook; maybe someone de-friends me. Many of the individuals I am “friends” with on Facebook I have never spoken to or shared a coffee with. There are even a couple I have never met in real life.
At some point, I began to question what function Facebook played in my life. Early on, I liked posting status updates. I would often be frank in my status updates, and realized that sometimes, that freaks people out. Other times I’d try to be clever. And that just sounds pretentious. Eventually, I stopped posting status updates because I got too self-conscious about it. What would people think if I wrote, “Sometimes there are no words”? Would they assume something bad had happened to me? Maybe, maybe not. I just knew that at some point I stopped doing it altogether.
I also found myself fascinated by other people’s photos. I like taking photos myself, so I’m always interested in what other people think makes a good photo. So I’d look around at photos. Because “friends” get tagged by other people who may not be your friend, you end up getting a glimpse into albums you wouldn’t ordinarily get to see, full of photos of people you don’t know. And, because I love photos, I look. And because so many people post photos, there are always so many to see. Then I realized I barely post photos. I have only a few albums. But I don’t tag myself or anyone else. And I remove tags people make for me. If I’m so unwilling to share my own photos, why am I more willing to look at the photos of others, often of people I don’t even know?
So, just recently, I decided to limit my Facebook use. Part of this decision was based on my tendency to get lost in a myriad of information I don’t need. Another part of this decision had to do with other people’s use of Facebook. I didn’t want to see this person or that person post about this issue or that issue. Sometimes, certain agendas get pushed. Opinions feel shoved down the throat. Complaints about bad days got tiring. So, I thought, I’ll only go on it once a day, in the morning, to check for messages. This strategy lasted a week. Pretty quickly, I was back to my old routine, going on it a few times a day, knowingly wasting time, and contributing nothing.
This sounds like a lot of whining, I know. Especially since there is so much to like about Facebook. It’s a good venue to find long-lost friends and be connected to people you may not be otherwise — like old high school friends. It’s a good venue for artists and businesses to promote their stuff. It’s a good venue for sharing with people who like the same things as you do. It’s a way to create a collage of yourself; an identity maker, in a sense. It’s all that. I know that. But it’s also a strange place to live friendships out. It’s a strange place to go and expect friendships to thrive. It’s not the place I want to go for my birthday. I want the phone call and the dinner out. It’s also not where I want to work out ideas or problems or fears.
I learnt this by virtue of being recently de-friended by someone close to me. It felt not unlike being 10 years old on the playground, standing off to the side as your “friends” ignore you. You try to play with them, and they turn their backs on you, or stick out their tongue, or tell you you can’t play with them any more. You want to ask, “Why are you mad at me?” but you know they’ll just make up some reason like, you smell, or your pants are ugly. So, here I am, 38 years old, once again asking myself the question, “Did I do something wrong?” and once again, feeling like a little kid left alone in the playground, wanting her friend back. And I don’t want to feel like that.
This isn’t Facebook’s fault. It’s just that it has become this playground that, for me, is overly populated and a little bit tense. I can’t seem to move within the crowd. People are blocking the slides and swing sets. There must be somewhere else to play that’s got more wide open spaces.
Listening In
Thank God for my ipad Shuffle. I learned, only recently, what an invaluable tool it is when riding the subway to work, or ambling up stairs trying to avoid the sharp elbows of college students. The ipad Shuffle is like a constant conversation with Stevie Nicks, Judy Garland, or Florence and the Machine. So, last Saturday was no different, when I placed my earphones in and turned up Michael Jackson as I made my way to the Dufferin Mall for some afternoon shopping. I was able, during my trip through the mall, to avoid the chatty saleswoman in Aldo because I couldn’t hear her. I happily made my way to Carlton Cards, oblivious to children’s screams and in-your-face sales pitches.
I had to eventually take the headphones off to make my purchase. When the salesperson asked for 2 cents, I apologized for keeping all my change in a penny jar at home. Then the man ahead of me quickly offered up the 2 cents; that is, before checking to see if he actually had the 2 cents. As it turned out, he didn’t. We all laughed about the silliness of pennies, and then the man left. But the salesperson could not get over his gesture. “You just don’t see that these days,” she gushed at least three times, before handing me my change and my bag of cards. I agreed, and was glad to hear her get so excited over it. Then, in Le Chateau, the salesperson and I had a nice chat about variations of blue. She made a joke, and I laughed, and again, it was all very nice to hear.
I left Dufferin Mall after a jaunt through No Frills. I decided not to put my headphones back on for the walk home, and got to hear all sorts of things: snippets of happy conversations, the rattle of beer cans in a garbage bag, the wheels of a grocery cart rolling over pavement, the buzz of a bike chain, someone letting go of a door. Sometimes you’ve got to tune out of your world and listen to what the city is saying.
Sometimes Daydreams Come True
Sometimes, daydreams come true. Thanks to my mum and sister, I now have a ruby slipper:
Daydream…
I recently learned that a pair of Judy Garland‘s (or Dorothy’s) ruby slippers (#7) will go up for auction this December through auction house Profiles in History (which, just this summer, sold a test pair of the slippers from Debbie Reynold’s extensive Hollywood memorabilia collection for over $600,000). There are four known pairs in existence (that is, those used in the film and/or in marketing campaigns), of varying size (two are in private collections; one is in the Smithsonian; and the other was stolen in 2005 from a museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, and never recovered). More than likely there are more; perhaps even those worn by Judy’s stand-in, Bobbie Koshay. The pair being sold are pictured here, and said to be the very ones in which Dorothy clicked her heels three times — probably the slippers’ most famous scene:
I immediately had an elaborate daydream as I stared at the picture above of the estimated $3-million-dollar, sparkle-encrusted shoes, with their tidy bows (constructed by none other than Hollywood’s premiere designer, Adrian), that another pair is out there somewhere, in some old, eccentric woman’s house, horded in a box in her closet. She has never told anyone she has a pair, not even her children. She was, perhaps, a young employee of MGM, or the child of a crew member, allowed on set to watch film magic be made. Maybe she was asked to run small errands. Maybe she rummaged around wardrobe, trying on random dresses and hats and shoes. Maybe a pair of slippers were discarded after a day’s shoot, and maybe she picked them up and brought them home, unbeknownst to anyone. Then, every once in a while, over the course of decades, whenever she was alone in her house, she’d put them on, and, standing in her bedroom or her kitchen, click her heels three times, assuming the part of the orphan girl on a great adventure. And maybe she decides, now that she is old, to give the shoes to someone she knows will love and appreciate them as much as she has. And maybe that person is me. Maybe, she happens to read my series of Oz poems, and, touched, sends me a letter, inviting me to come visit her. And maybe I go, and she tells me stories of being on The Wizard of Oz set; stories no one has heard, not even her children. Then she hands me a box, and tells me that the shoes are mine, that they are the very shoes that skipped down the yellow brick road in the Scarecrow sequence.
I come home, and hide the shoes away, and tell no one. Then, whenever my boyfriend goes out, I carefully remove the shoes from the box, play “If I Only Had A Brain,” and, since they don’t fit on my feet, turn them over in my hands like a precious diamond, and watch as they sparkle.
Note: For more information about the history of the various ruby slippers (as well as a fascinating account of the blogger’s year-long journey to make a replica of the shoes) go to this wonderful blog, The Ruby Slippers Project.
