When I wake up, Mom's already awake. Not terribly uncommon, nor is the fact that she's singing. Off-key and off-beat, with words she's substituting in that fit her mood. She can sing pretty, but she doesn't usually make the effort.
I emerge from my bedroom swaddled against the morning crispness in a robe and slippers. My hair is wreaking revenge for the fact that I teased it for last night's game, and is currently smashed on one side and billowing out the other. It looks like a drunken steeple that's lilting off the side of my head. I make my way to the kitchen, where Mom is standing at the counter, washing dishes. She's also in her pajamas--embarrassingly a Hello Kitty set with matching robe and slippers. As though she were fifteen and not forty-five. I'm about to comment when I see the Thermos waiting patiently on the counter to be washed. I look at the calendar. That's right; it's the Duck Races.
The Duck Races are a local milestone, the first event of autumn. The Rotary Club sells tickets for two months beforehand, five dollars apiece. Each ticket gets you one yellow rubber duck. All the ducks with your ticket numbers on them are loaded into a huge Dumpster, lifted over the frigid Columbia River via crane, and then unloaded into the water. The ducks float down-current, and the first few to cross the finish line win their owners sweet prizes. The prizes are donated by local businesses, and the money goes to charity, but it's the event to be at. Everyone is there, newly swaddled in light jackets and scarves, maybe even a hat and mittens if the October morning is bleak enough. There are vendors and games and about a million kids running around, their hands and faces sticky with cotton candy and candy apples and whatever else they can get their parents' wallets to open up for. The weather today looks bright and crisp, though the weather man was forecasting highs in the upper seventies last night. The sky is immaculately clear, and reminds me of a stained glass window that the sun is pressing up against.
"I got this Thermos for five dollars at the Value Village before you were even born," Mom says when she sees I'm up. She cradles it like Vanna White displaying the latest prize on the Wheel of Fortune. I've heard the story a million times, and while it grates to hear it every year, I love that Thermos. It's full of good memories, and promises of moments of my family spending time together. My mom busts it out for Duck Races and puts it away after Easter every year. In between time, it's seen at football games, the Winter Carnival, the Christmas Boat Parade, the Christmas Eve bonfire that my parents host every year, and myriad events in between. I can't help the grin that splits my face as I lean up to kiss her on the cheek.
"I'm gonna go shower and get ready," I say. "This is the year my duck's gonna win."
"Good, because we could use a new firepit for Christmas Eve," she counters, then returns to washing dishes.
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Saturday, October 1, 2011
Facebook no more
There's a general unrest in the land of Facebook these days. I think Google+ may have unearthed it originally, but Facebook itself has done the best job of excavating it and polishing it off with its new changes--especially the unfinished mobile app. I mean, really, who accesses Facebook on their PC anymore? People are starting to wonder why they have a PC in the first place at this point... Until they have to write a paper or something. Though even then, you can hook a keyboard up to an iPad...
Remember the early days of the migration of social networking on the internet? When it first started taking off, first started being available to most households (insert sound of dialup here), there was the Bulletin Board Systems, rudimentary DOS-based chat rooms. People were content with these kind of things, basic conversations with mostly strangers about a variety of topics. Then they became overrun by trolls, and people wanted a personal touch. So the solution? Everyone learned HTML. At least everyone in my circle.
That's right, a lot of people had their own webpages on Angelfire or Yahoo or another free site. Sometimes they would help you make your website, but those weren't nearly as fun as making them yourself. Creating the little buttons in Paint that said About Me or My Friends. Uploading everything ten items at a time on the slow dial-up. Sitting back and relaxing and marveling at your genius. Linking to your friends' webpages and checking them out, too. And then came along a different kind of item: MySpace.
It was like everyone could have their own uniform webpage. You could change the background color, add a song that would automatically play on startup, but there was still the basic formula: You would make posts, long or short, and upload pictures, and then link to your friends' MySpace pages. Click on them daily to read their posts and look at their pictures. You could even use it for online dating if you preferred (and I did, once!). And then a strange thing happened... Everyone started vacating MySpace. Using something new called Facebook.
I didn't really like Facebook at first. I resisted. Microblogging didn't seem the way of the future. We had been conditioned by all the previous formats to be long-winded and expressive. We could rhapsodize about any given topic, though of course we all had our favorites. And yet, Facebook took hold. And alongside it, Twitter, which was even more microscopic. We were becoming a society that was addicted to the news bite, no matter how mundane. We needed the constant feed of what was happening in everyone else's life. Rarely was it earth-shaking or insightful. Triviality was the name of the game. By casting this global net for every acquaintance ever formed, we had made our world microscopic, a cesspool of narcissism that self-perpetuated.
And now Facebook is self-destructing. Google+ is waiting to pick up the pieces, but quite frankly, it's more of the same. We need something different. Something outreaching. Something global that will wake us up and shake us from our micro-communities. Allow us to break through to new insight, or at least new viewpoints. We have been minimized to the point that we cannot shorten our thought processes any further. Is the solution going back to blogging? Is it sites like livingsocial.com, that uproot us from our computer chairs altogether? I don't know, but I do know it's not going to be Facebook in disguise, no matter how much Google wants to think they've streamlined or improved the process.
Remember the early days of the migration of social networking on the internet? When it first started taking off, first started being available to most households (insert sound of dialup here), there was the Bulletin Board Systems, rudimentary DOS-based chat rooms. People were content with these kind of things, basic conversations with mostly strangers about a variety of topics. Then they became overrun by trolls, and people wanted a personal touch. So the solution? Everyone learned HTML. At least everyone in my circle.
That's right, a lot of people had their own webpages on Angelfire or Yahoo or another free site. Sometimes they would help you make your website, but those weren't nearly as fun as making them yourself. Creating the little buttons in Paint that said About Me or My Friends. Uploading everything ten items at a time on the slow dial-up. Sitting back and relaxing and marveling at your genius. Linking to your friends' webpages and checking them out, too. And then came along a different kind of item: MySpace.
It was like everyone could have their own uniform webpage. You could change the background color, add a song that would automatically play on startup, but there was still the basic formula: You would make posts, long or short, and upload pictures, and then link to your friends' MySpace pages. Click on them daily to read their posts and look at their pictures. You could even use it for online dating if you preferred (and I did, once!). And then a strange thing happened... Everyone started vacating MySpace. Using something new called Facebook.
I didn't really like Facebook at first. I resisted. Microblogging didn't seem the way of the future. We had been conditioned by all the previous formats to be long-winded and expressive. We could rhapsodize about any given topic, though of course we all had our favorites. And yet, Facebook took hold. And alongside it, Twitter, which was even more microscopic. We were becoming a society that was addicted to the news bite, no matter how mundane. We needed the constant feed of what was happening in everyone else's life. Rarely was it earth-shaking or insightful. Triviality was the name of the game. By casting this global net for every acquaintance ever formed, we had made our world microscopic, a cesspool of narcissism that self-perpetuated.
And now Facebook is self-destructing. Google+ is waiting to pick up the pieces, but quite frankly, it's more of the same. We need something different. Something outreaching. Something global that will wake us up and shake us from our micro-communities. Allow us to break through to new insight, or at least new viewpoints. We have been minimized to the point that we cannot shorten our thought processes any further. Is the solution going back to blogging? Is it sites like livingsocial.com, that uproot us from our computer chairs altogether? I don't know, but I do know it's not going to be Facebook in disguise, no matter how much Google wants to think they've streamlined or improved the process.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)