I Am Unfriended

   In the London Free Press today, there was an article on how our social media lives interact with our actual, daily lives. The subject was "unfriending" people in social media.
   The gist of the article was that being "unfriended" by someone on Facebook muddied up your actual relationship with both that person and, by inference, any mutual circle of friends.
   I had already been thinking of this as a blog topic and the fact that it popped up as an article in the paper seems fortuitous.

   Lately, I have been paying more attention to my friend list on Facebook. There was a time not that long ago when if you'd asked me how many Facebook friends I had I wouldn't have been able to tell you. These days, I know exactly. There is the usual smattering of work friends, relatives, people I went to school with and others who, usually through recreational activities, I have acquired. There are even one or two total strangers, people who I have actually never met. They ended up friends with me only because they were friends of friends or because they maybe went to the same public school fifty years ago. This criteria, by the way, means you could have a "friend" simply because the same sun shines on you, and on and on.
   Why I have been paying attention more so lately to my friend list is because it used to be a fairly round figure that I would occasionally notice and then one day it occurred to me that it was not the same round figure anymore. I had been unfriended by someone.
   At this point, I still don't know exactly who did the dirty deed. This is because there is a tendency to lose track of who your friends actually are. Sometimes you'll see a name and a face pop up so often on other peoples walls that they begin to feel like they're one of your friends, when in fact this isn't so. This kind of clouds the issue as to who my friends are and who they aren't. Then, when I lose one of them, it's a little tricky to figure out who it might have been.
   As I said, someone had unfriended me. I didn't know who it was so I couldn't let it bother me too much. Then, a couple of days later, someone else unfriended me. Fearing a trend, I started to become socially panicked and immediately headed for my friend list, desperate to find out who these people might have been. I started with my closest circle of family and friends and quickly discovered I was no longer friends with my youngest son's girlfriend. This was confusing but upon further investigation I found out that basically she was bowing out of participating in Facebook altogether. So this doesn't really count, I guess. I have been keeping my eye on the friend tally since then and it has remained constant so no worries.
   I have been unfriended before and have no idea why. My first thought was that I said something to offend the person and I had the urge to find out and apologize, if indeed that's what had happened. Respecting the person's privacy, however, I didn't.
   I was the victim of a wave of unfriendings due to work issues, I believe. Many of my Facebook friends are also co-workers and this always presents difficulties when people's private lives collide with their workplace lives. Part of what made this particularly difficult for me was that Doralyn is part of the management group where we both work and this kind of put me in that same category.
   The newspaper article cited a university study which found that forty per cent of people would avoid, in real life, someone who had unfriended them. Other people described having been unfriended by family members and the dysfunction this then caused in the family.

   For my part, I can live with being unfriended as long as it wasn't for something I might have inadvertently said or done which then caused hurt feelings. This would make me feel bad. As for other unfriendings of other kinds, I can live with them. What it does create, though, is a sense that you are no longer trusted with peering through little windows into people's lives, as mundane and run-of-the-mill as they might be. As much as I would try and not let this cloud my relationship with someone who has unfriended me, there still remains a bit of a wall (okay, call it a veil, maybe) between the two of us. The point is made in the newspaper article that in a social media which is free of cost, free of effort and free of guilt by association then, when someone takes the time and effort to search you out and unfriend you, it's hard not to take it personally.
   The article also talks about the loss of self-esteem which arises in the person who has been unfriended and that the pain caused by a relationship breakdown on a social media can actually be greater than if it had occurred in real life. This alone indicates how pervasive social media has become and perhaps even why cyber-bullying now has such a toehold.
   It is good sometimes to have a thick skin and to know where and when to wield it. Someone my age clearly remembers an age when social media did not exist and, as much as it does occasionally give me pause to ponder the odd relationship, it simply will not colour the way I go about interacting with the world around me. 

  

"Would anyone like to sit on the purple couch?"

   It seems these days that if you're not a redneck, a gypsy, have ten kids or are a foul-mouthed housewife then you're going to have a hard time landing your own show on reality television.

Andrea Syrtash and Dale Curd

   In our house, we have varying levels of acceptance for many of these shows but a lot of time is spent shaking our heads at what is being presented. Much of it is simply mind-numbing, train wreck stuff. But not all of it.
   Our newest favourite show is on Canada's OWN and it is called Life Story Project. It is co-hosted by Andrea Syrtash and Dale Curd and the simplicity of its concept and the resulting insight to the human condition is what has drawn us to it.
   The hosts simply plop a purple couch down in the middle of a well-travelled area in a major Canadian city and invite passersby to sit and talk. There is a theme topic to every show and the interviewees will be asked to talk abut their life experience with that particular topic.
   This week's topic was Fear and Change. Other topics have included Love and Betrayal and Love and Regret, as well as a variety of others.

The famous purple couch

   Not every person passing by is interested in talking and the ones that do take that leap of faith have no idea what the topic might be when they take their spot on the purple couch.
   It is quite often an amazing transformation that occurs when people find out what the topic is and then realize that, yes, they do have something to say about that. Dale and Andrea have the ability to make people feel open to revealing aspects of their lives which otherwise might have remained untalked about. Quite often what occurs is that a strongly cathartic moment is caught on screen. I have yet to watch an episode that did not almost move me to tears at some point.
   What is compelling about the show is that you quite often see little bits of your own life up there. It makes you realize, no matter what trials and tribulations you've encountered over the years, that you are not alone in many of them.

Dale, trying to enlist participants.

   Often, as people finish talking about their experiences, you wish you were there so you could simply give them a hug. This week, an elderly gentleman was talking about the love he felt for his wife of many years. He wrestled a little bit with trying to describe it faithfully and finally said that part of the reason he loved her so much was simply because she wanted to be with him. He seemed almost flabbergasted by this and just talking about it brought him to tears. They also spoke with a woman who talked about her cancer experience and was asked just when it was with that experience that she started to feel the fear. This is a woman who, as she was speaking, has been told she likely only has about two years to live. In the short period of time she was on screen, though, you could do nothing but empathize and identify with her. Then you find out what her prognosis is...
   It is powerful T.V., to be certain. It is also one of the clearest examples I know of T.V. at its best. Sifting through the morass of everything else that's out there and chancing upon this gem makes the watching experience just that much more worthwhile.
  
  
  
  
  

Jesus, God and Facebook

   There is no shortage of inspiration on Facebook these days. There are inspirational videos, inspirational songs, inspirational posters and, on my Facebook screens lately, inspirational Bible quotations.
   We have a friend who occasionally posts Bible quotations as her status at any given time. If you are used to the usual omg's and wtf's on Facebook statuses these days then a Bible quotation really does grab your attention. One can only imagine that if they'd had Facebook a couple of thousand years ago then these kinds of statuses would have been de rigueur. Nowadays, they kind of stop you in your tracks.
   Our friend is a fairly recent born-again Christian and her religion has become an integral part of her life. She attends church, Bible study classes and prayer groups on a regular basis so she does not just give lip service to her new-found faith.
   Apart from Facebook, she invokes God and Jesus (and probably the Holy Ghost, although I am unable to recall a specific occurrence of this) on a pretty regular basis in her daily travels and in a variety of settings. She is not bashful about her religion and I have a hard time faulting her for this--any kind of a strong belief system is a valuable commodity these days.
   If you know me or have followed this blog consistently for any length of time (okay, I am talking to all three of you now) then you are likely aware that I don't believe in deities, the Bible, or organized religion. I am also of the belief that there may not even have been an historical Jesus. So when I see a Bible quote used as a Facebook status or when I hear proclamations that God and/or Jesus is responsible for the occasional nice thing that happens to us, buzzing starts inside my head.
   It's not the kind of buzzing likely to make my head explode. But close.
    More than a lot of other statements people make, comments which are religion-based always make me want to sit down with whoever made them and have a talk.
   What I need to find out from them is why they believe what they believe. I need to find out what they heard or what they read or who they listened to that made them believe so totally in a faith that they then feel empowered to freely interject references to it throughout their daily interactions with people.
    Here's how the dynamic works for me. It can be a beautiful day out and our friend will come along and say something like, "It's a beautiful day out! Thanks be to Jesus!" At this point, my day becomes slightly less beautiful and here's why. I was already enjoying the same beautiful day and subconsciously was giving credit to the change of seasons, the high pressure system, the prevailing westerlies, and whatever meteorological forces there were at play. My friend comes along and essentially tells me I'm wrong, that Jesus made the beautiful day.
   Now, I don't mind being wrong about a whole multitude of things but I hate being beholding to Jesus for anything, let alone the state of the weather. And if Jesus/God is responsible for the great weather then we can only assume that he is just as responsible for the blizzards and typhoons which kill thousands of people each year.
   Some day I would like to sit down with our friend and simply ask her why she believes so strongly. I would actually like to sit down with anyone who is strongly religious (regardless of faith) and ask them what happened to produce this fervour. I would like to find out if it was something they read, was some person influential in their lives, was there something written somewhere which produced this faith or did they witness some act which then made them strongly believe.
    Unless you've witnessed some verifiable miracle, it strikes me that if you've based your faith on something you've read or been told then you're doing nothing more than taking some other person's word for it. That other person could be extremely eloquent and utter things which are uplifting, supportive and make total sense but it is still that person's word for it you're taking (grasping desperately, in some cases).
   In researching for this blog post, I found reams of Bible quotations popping up on the screen, one right after the other. As you scroll down, they take on a very soothing cumulative effect. The fact that they're all from the Bible almost seems irrelevant after awhile. There is such a plethora of uplifting material on the internet these days you could just as easily be scrolling a screen of uplifting quotations by Maya Angelou, Gandhi or Helen Keller and a whole bunch other anonymous persons. Yet, we don't worship these people as gods. And some of these people verifiably existed, much more verifiably than Jesus.

Lewis Black, with a slightly angrier religious quote.

   I consider the Bible to be no more than the words of men; men who have passed on stories from other men, men who have transcribed those stories they heard and men who have transcribed other men's transcriptions. If there is a God, he may have entered into it somewhere as well but what we got was one man's interpretation of his interaction with God, or the gods. There are newer versions of the Bible these days which have done away with the stiltedly formal language of the Bible our generation grew up with (I'm almost sixty) and you can imagine that some day there will be slang and street language in there, as well. All because humans wrote it and it will be humans who re-write it.
   There is a well-known communications exercise which involves a group of people sitting in a circle. The leader of the group whispers a brief, scripted story to the person beside them. This person then tries to whisper the same story to the person beside them. Eventually, this story gets whispered all the way around the circle. When the last person has heard the story, they are asked to repeat their version of it, aloud, to the rest of the group. This person's story is generally almost unrecognizable from the original. What happened along the way was that people would use slightly different language, perhaps language they felt more personally comfortable with as they passed the story on. A part of the story might have seemed more significant to one person than the other so it got emphasized a little more. The more times this happened, the more disjointed the story would become. One of the things to remember is that this also happens within the space of maybe ten minutes. Bible stories have been rolling around for thousands of years! How do you think the original stories might have changed, in the intervening years...?

   So I want to ask my friend what she bases her faith on. I want to find out whether it is blind faith or a faith constructed on any foundation of  evidence. When she tells me what she bases her faith on, I want to ask why? I don't want to know in an inquisitional kind of way but people who put their faith right out there for others to experience should be prepared for the experience to become interactive. In fact, I think they should almost want it to be. 
  

Agendas

   A couple of weeks ago I was headed off to work and Doralyn asked me what my day looked like. I listed off the things I thought I needed or wanted to do. At that point, the list became my agenda. There was great comfort in having an agenda that seemed effortless and manageable.
   Upon actually arriving at work, however, my agenda went right out the window.
   I work with people who are intellectually challenged and the first person I went to see presented me with a t.v. which had been pulled out from the wall, a mess of wires and cables leading from it to a brand new dvd player he'd bought on his own. Nothing worked.
   When it comes to technology, I am as intellectually disabled as the next person and was of little assistance in this case. The overriding situation, however, was the conflict of agendas. My agenda included taking this gentleman for breakfast as this was our once-a-month routine. His agenda, obviously, was being able to use his dvd player.
   I was much more annoyed at the agenda conflict than he was. My annoyance, coupled with my hunger and lack of tech ability, made the situation unresolvable. We managed to still make it out for breakfast and while eating I was able to come up with a line of action for this man to follow. Doing so allowed him to hook up his dvd player successfully.
   Unless you are a single person who is self-employed, you are going to run into agenda conflict on a regular basis. Even if you do fall into this category you will still occasionally find your self in this conflict with drivers in cars, store clerks, bank managers, customers, crossing guards, repairmen, spouses and pets. In short, any other person with a mind of their own. And an agenda.
   The trick in dealing with all this is simply to realize that we all have our own agendas and that what a person is saying on the outside may belie what they are actually thinking or planning on the inside. Of course, behaviour over a period of time will give you the truer measure of a person.
   It's really not possible to walk around without an agenda of your own, they pretty well help chart a course for your day, week or even your life. Having an agenda which somewhat meshes with the important people in your life, however, always helps. They don't have to always be totally in sync but just realizing where they might diverge will get you through a lot of rough spots.
   At work, agendas can be an issue. Any time you have a large group of people who are supposedly all gathered to accomplish the same goal you're going to have to deal with agendas. Where I work, one of the agenda issues we face on a pretty well daily basis is similar to the one I described above. We, as support staff, spend time with people whose agendas can be widely variant. We have been given what seems like, both to them and to us, an unspoken power over their lives. Throughout the work day we encounter situations where it is quite easy to impose our agendas on the people we support. Realizing this and remembering not to do it are vital. It is also vital to watch what goes on with other people and point out where you think there might be a perceived agenda issue.
   A very quick work-related agenda issue story---a few years ago one of the people I work with called me at home to say he'd fallen in the bathroom, hit his head, and that he was bleeding a little. I had to drive more or less across town to go and investigate and on the drive there was desperately trying to figure out how to mesh our two different agendas. It was my day off, I had stuff to do, could I get by with just applying a band aid, etc., etc. He greeted me at his apartment door and when I took a look at the ear he said had been bleeding, I realized that he had somehow almost severed the top half of it right off and that it was only really hanging there by a fleshy thread. At this point, no real issue with agendas! In an odd kind of way this was kind of cool because when I saw his ear any sort of agenda burden I might have had on the way there flew right off my shoulder. Nine hours of emergency room waiting later, he was all taken care of!
   As I mentioned before, sometimes the trick is just to remember that yours is not the only agenda in play out there. Nowhere is this likely more apparent than right in your own family. There are as many different agendas as there are family members and if you're going to pick one to try to more or less be in sync with then I would suggest concentrating on your spouse's. Enough said, as this is likely a whole new blog topic somewhere down the road!
   Good luck, hopefully, with your agenda and trying to follow it. There's a true skill in realizing when it can be altered and when it is something which really needs to be adhered to. Don't give up your principles along the way but, at the same time, you are not alone in the world either. Not only is your agenda likely going to differ from the next person you run in to but that person's perception of what the issue even is could be totally different and wildly divergent from yours, or even a lot of people's. So take this into account and, every once in awhile, experiment with flipping through someone else's agenda for a change! 
  
  

Mediums

   As I travel through my day, I occasionally find myself wondering how many of my dead relatives might be watching what goes on in my life. I then find myself wondering if they approve and are they disappointed or proud. I also wonder what I might hear if there were any way of communicating with them.
   I have always enjoyed watching mediums ply their trade on television, people such as Sylvia Browne, Theresa Caputo and John Edward. I am prone to believing in their abilities and always enjoy the reactions you invariably get from the people being "read".
   There is something in me (and, I suspect, something in a lot of us) which makes me want to desperately believe in mediums and, by default, the spirit world. It is simply comforting to think there is a benign and welcoming place we're all headed for after we pass.
   If mediums truly are capable of communicating with the dead, however, this raises a multitude of questions. As I have pondered the issue of mediums' abilities over the years, the questions have only mounted. Here are some:

   Why aren't most murder cases instantly solvable?
   Why do the dead only seem to have nice things to say about the living?
   What can the afterlife be like if I need to jostle other spirits out of the way in order to communicate with my loved ones?
   What do the dead do when they're not communicating with mediums? Do they talk amongst themselves?
   Do the dead watch you in the shower?
   Why don't spirits from 1754 ever show up? Or 1906 and so on...?
   Are there animal spirits running around in the spirit world, too?
   If spirits can watch out for you can they also enable bad things to happen?
   Can spirits follow around total strangers? Or are they more or less tied down to people who were in their lives in the earthly world?
   Are spirits around forever...? Or is there a shelf life?

   Some of these questions seem a little frivolous and I am aware of that. It might also seem as though I am making light of what mediums do. At the same time, what I see represented through the media begs most of these questions, when you really stop to think about it.
   I also find it vaguely irritating that, after a reading ends, life seems to go on normally. It always feels as though there should be more to it than a spirit saying "It wasn't your fault that Mack truck hit us" or "The other day when that picture of your dead mother fell in your soup, that was me!" Sometimes I just want to scream hey, you were just talking to dead people, find out what it's like out there! Is there a God, are there angels, when will the world end?! Get back in there and find out NOW, dammit!
   Think about it. Someone on T.V. claims to have just communicated with the dead. This suggests there is life after death and, if this is the case, might explain why we are all here. Perhaps at this point anything else you might have seen on T.V., any book you might have read, any conversation you may have had, or any act you took part in becomes almost irrelevant by comparison. Speaking with the dead is monumental and yet in this world we live in it is used only as a hook for reality T.V.
   The dead seem happy. They don't seem to carry grudges and they appear to be very forgiving. Given the show you are watching, however, they are portrayed as either very warm and comforting or restless and terrifying. Who knows what the spirit world is truly like (if there is one), perhaps it is a world very (too) much like our own, with all its different layers of happiness and despair.

   I used to have my own vision of an afterlife. In this vision, when I pass I finally lose all the earthly constraints of the laws of physics and am suddenly able to explore the far reaches of the universe, maybe even engage in a little time travel. Truly, there would be no limit to what I might be able to do. The mediums I have come to be familiar with through the media seem to suggest, however, that spirits are a little more earthbound than that, a little more intrinsically tied to the goings-on of their loved ones. This would be okay, too, in my afterlife. In the end, as the mediums suggest, life goes on in some form and life going on in any form is of some comfort.
   Earlier on, I listed some of the questions I had about the nature of the spirit world. One more just popped into my head.
   I wonder if mediums are afraid to die?
  

  
     

The King Dies In Battle

Skeleton of Richard III

   This past week, much was made about the apparent discovery of the bones of Great Britain's King Richard III. It was particularly big news here in London, Ontario because they were able to ascertain that this particular set of bones were indeed the king's through DNA testing which combined a sample from a former Londoner whose mother was a direct descendant of Richard.
   The injuries on the skeleton were consistent with the historical account of how Richard III died--as the result of taking an axe to the head in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. The skeleton also showed signs of scoliosis, a curvature of the spine which would produce a hunchback. Richard III is said to have been hunchbacked.
   The Battle of Bosworth Field marked the end of the Wars of the Roses and was the last time a British monarch was killed in battle.

Canadian Michael Ibsen, DNA provider, and a computer-generated 3D likeness of Richard III

   I found this whole story to be quite fascinating but the aspect of it that I found most thought-provoking was the fact that a reigning monarch had been engaged in a battle in the first place.
   Granted, these were medieval times and wars were carried out totally differently but how odd that the most important person in your country might be subjugated to an actual battle and all its obviously inherent danger.
   The death of Richard III and the end of the Wars of the Roses is regarded as the end of the medieval period, as well. I can only imagine that future monarchs, when faced with the possibility of having to take part in an actual battle, likely declined, on the grounds that doing so seemed so...well...medieval.
   It's interesting to ponder the future of war if the leaders of the various factions involved were required to physically participate. Barring that, would a war even begin if the leaders' family members were required to be the first to enter the fray. I think not.
   I wonder what Richard III was thinking as he rode off to battle that day. Did he know he would end up in the fiercest part of it? Did he begin the march far back at the rear of things or did he bravely (stupidly) affix himself to the forefront? Was he so enamoured of his own sovereignity that he imagined himself invulnerable in battle? Or was he as scared as any of the foot soldiers?

Depiction of the Battle of Bosworth Field--Richard III in a slightly better moment...

   After his death, Richard III's body was apparently subjected to all sorts of abuse and humiliation before it was unceremoniously dumped in a grave, without benefit of a shroud, coffin or even clothes. How demoralizing this must have been for his followers, to not only lose their king but then to have their noses rubbed in it, so to speak. Perhaps this is reason enough to leave your leaders out of the fray.
   As a combatant, I wonder what it must be like to have your leader, king or general fighting right along beside you. Would this be an uplifting and inspirational thing? Or a distraction? In the middle of a battle do we all become simply soldiers with nary a regard for crowns or rank?
   I have never been interested in soldiering. Were I to find myself in that situation, all I might want from a leader is to demonstrate that he or she was aware of my sacrifice and was prepared to go to the ends of the earth to enable me to fight and protect myself in the best way possible. In a perfect world, though, this sacrifice would be shared from top to bottom. In an even more perfect world, there would be no need for it.