So where have I been lately...?
Facebook, actually.
If any of you have a Facebook account, you can look me up here.
How do I like it?
It ain't Live Journal.
My niece was actually the one who browbeat me into signing up, because apparently that's how they share a lot of photos. And immediately my Friends filled up with Wilsons or some derivative thereof--which was a little creepy, actually, especially when some of them are ones from which I'm expecting an apology. But there would be no apology forthcoming, I imagine, especially not via Facebook, and it's like everyone just wants to forget what happened and get on with things. Which is kind of OK, too, I guess...
But the thing is, being on Facebook with Family is kind of awkward, because not only do a lot of them want to forget everything that happened, they also want to forget that it's actually me they're communicating with.
I feel kind of like the poster child for "Love The Sinner, Hate The Sin". They want to love me on principle, because I'm kin to them, but it's much easier to do at a distance.
The differences between my blood and me are fairly glaring, but everyone is being very polite about it.
The niece who browbeat me has some very Jesus-y shit up on her notes, and it's kind of interesting because...Well, just a bit of a backstory here, she's a Political Science major at UGA, and one of her particularly heart-rending entries is one that she wrote on the eve of the election, and she uses the same tone that one would use on the eve of the Apolcalypse instead. She, for all her expanding education, is fiercely in the grip of the handwringing weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth about McCain's inevitable trouncing. To her credit, she assures her readership that she still believes in "Thy will be done", but it's clear that her 20 year old logic is trying to figure out why only a miracle would put McCain in the White House--and why that miracle didn't happen.
And you know, she's a fucking bright kid, and this is the stuff she's studying, so it's kind of pissing me off.
Part of me wants to confront her and ask her if there's anything that she's learned in her classes that would actually warrant her fear of Obama stepping into the White House, or if it's just the voices of all the saints and martyrs and aborted babies screaming at her that it's the end of the world as we know it because we actually have a President Elect now who is willing to use his brains before his ego and his gonads. I mean, I know it's Georgia and all, but isn't this supposed to be an institution of higher learning?
But I won't confront her--at least not anywhere where anyone can hear us. But she needs to learn, more than anything else, that she can look at a political situation and not be blinded by her religion. She needs to know that she is not irreligious if she votes for a qualified individual, and she needs to know that she needs to use that education she's getting when building the foundations of her logical choices, and not the brainwashings of the fundie right-wingers who think that all of us are going to hell because we voted for Obama.
I don't want to judge her--it's possible that she did reach a logical, educated conclusion as to why she came down on the side of McCain.
But it sure as hell didn't look that way. And that may be part of the problem, yanno? I mean, if she studied the facts, and looked at these two men on the basis of what she was able to ascertain about them, and make her choice that way, then I can respect and accept what she did. But the thing is, when she writes all this Jesus Freaks For Palin shit on her Facebook page, she certainly doesn't give the impression that she voted beyond her religious--or maybe even her racial-- prejudices. And that would be a shame, because if there's one thing I've learned over the last eight years it's that voting for "God's Candidate" is, invariably, a mistake of, pardon the pun, Biblical proportions.
She also needs to let it go because it messes with her writing--it's all too easy for her to rely on the "Our God Is An Awesome God" catch phrases, cliche and jargon and fundamentalist melodrama and not enough on her own ability to be eloquent. She comes from a family of wordsmiths, and I'm hoping that an overexposure to Bill Gaither hasn't completely dissolved that from her DNA, because she's going to need to know how to express herself in a different way if she wants to be a lawyer.
So yeah, I'm feeling the minor annoyance I always feel when thrust into too close a proximity with too many of my family members, but Facebook is kind of cool nevertheless. I've added a lot of LJ friends, and a lot of folks from work, and even a person I went to high school with who is now a gay rights activist in San Francisco. So I have what I think is a fun and interesting mix, and right now the sane friends are outnumbering the insane family by about 3 to 1. And the good thing about it is that, unlike LJ, nothing of great import is much revealed there--it doesn't seem a conducive environment for heavy unbosomings or flame wars.
Sort of an online cocktail party only into the first drink or two...before the bras unhook and the fists start flying! ;-)
But it's clearly user-unfriendly, and I'm still trying to figure a lot of it out.
In more mundane news, I'm imagining that even as I type this, Finn is coming out of anesthesia after his little "trim around the bottom", and that, as freyas_fire puts it, he will be doing the ouchy walk for a day or two. But I'm thinking that this is going to be a minor trauma compared to the insanity that was last night...
...but I'm going to put that story in another post.
If any of you have a Facebook account, you can look me up here.
How do I like it?
It ain't Live Journal.
My niece was actually the one who browbeat me into signing up, because apparently that's how they share a lot of photos. And immediately my Friends filled up with Wilsons or some derivative thereof--which was a little creepy, actually, especially when some of them are ones from which I'm expecting an apology. But there would be no apology forthcoming, I imagine, especially not via Facebook, and it's like everyone just wants to forget what happened and get on with things. Which is kind of OK, too, I guess...
But the thing is, being on Facebook with Family is kind of awkward, because not only do a lot of them want to forget everything that happened, they also want to forget that it's actually me they're communicating with.
I feel kind of like the poster child for "Love The Sinner, Hate The Sin". They want to love me on principle, because I'm kin to them, but it's much easier to do at a distance.
The differences between my blood and me are fairly glaring, but everyone is being very polite about it.
The niece who browbeat me has some very Jesus-y shit up on her notes, and it's kind of interesting because...Well, just a bit of a backstory here, she's a Political Science major at UGA, and one of her particularly heart-rending entries is one that she wrote on the eve of the election, and she uses the same tone that one would use on the eve of the Apolcalypse instead. She, for all her expanding education, is fiercely in the grip of the handwringing weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth about McCain's inevitable trouncing. To her credit, she assures her readership that she still believes in "Thy will be done", but it's clear that her 20 year old logic is trying to figure out why only a miracle would put McCain in the White House--and why that miracle didn't happen.
And you know, she's a fucking bright kid, and this is the stuff she's studying, so it's kind of pissing me off.
Part of me wants to confront her and ask her if there's anything that she's learned in her classes that would actually warrant her fear of Obama stepping into the White House, or if it's just the voices of all the saints and martyrs and aborted babies screaming at her that it's the end of the world as we know it because we actually have a President Elect now who is willing to use his brains before his ego and his gonads. I mean, I know it's Georgia and all, but isn't this supposed to be an institution of higher learning?
But I won't confront her--at least not anywhere where anyone can hear us. But she needs to learn, more than anything else, that she can look at a political situation and not be blinded by her religion. She needs to know that she is not irreligious if she votes for a qualified individual, and she needs to know that she needs to use that education she's getting when building the foundations of her logical choices, and not the brainwashings of the fundie right-wingers who think that all of us are going to hell because we voted for Obama.
I don't want to judge her--it's possible that she did reach a logical, educated conclusion as to why she came down on the side of McCain.
But it sure as hell didn't look that way. And that may be part of the problem, yanno? I mean, if she studied the facts, and looked at these two men on the basis of what she was able to ascertain about them, and make her choice that way, then I can respect and accept what she did. But the thing is, when she writes all this Jesus Freaks For Palin shit on her Facebook page, she certainly doesn't give the impression that she voted beyond her religious--or maybe even her racial-- prejudices. And that would be a shame, because if there's one thing I've learned over the last eight years it's that voting for "God's Candidate" is, invariably, a mistake of, pardon the pun, Biblical proportions.
She also needs to let it go because it messes with her writing--it's all too easy for her to rely on the "Our God Is An Awesome God" catch phrases, cliche and jargon and fundamentalist melodrama and not enough on her own ability to be eloquent. She comes from a family of wordsmiths, and I'm hoping that an overexposure to Bill Gaither hasn't completely dissolved that from her DNA, because she's going to need to know how to express herself in a different way if she wants to be a lawyer.
So yeah, I'm feeling the minor annoyance I always feel when thrust into too close a proximity with too many of my family members, but Facebook is kind of cool nevertheless. I've added a lot of LJ friends, and a lot of folks from work, and even a person I went to high school with who is now a gay rights activist in San Francisco. So I have what I think is a fun and interesting mix, and right now the sane friends are outnumbering the insane family by about 3 to 1. And the good thing about it is that, unlike LJ, nothing of great import is much revealed there--it doesn't seem a conducive environment for heavy unbosomings or flame wars.
Sort of an online cocktail party only into the first drink or two...before the bras unhook and the fists start flying! ;-)
But it's clearly user-unfriendly, and I'm still trying to figure a lot of it out.
In more mundane news, I'm imagining that even as I type this, Finn is coming out of anesthesia after his little "trim around the bottom", and that, as freyas_fire puts it, he will be doing the ouchy walk for a day or two. But I'm thinking that this is going to be a minor trauma compared to the insanity that was last night...
...but I'm going to put that story in another post.