The Friend That Needs a Daytimer

She is always late, or cancelling at the last minute. I have to add an extra thirty minutes to an hour to my plan for the day while I wait for her to catch up. It’s as if she doesn’t start getting ready to go out the door until at least five minutes after she said she would be there. You know it’s going to happen every time, yet you keep scheduling things with her. I should probably send reminder texts three days before, the morning of, and one hour before we are supposed to hang out. But then I would be carrying the friendship, the burden of effort on my shoulders. And what kind of friendship is that?

I stop scheduling things with her and then she sees me out one day and has the nerve to say something like, “where have you been? You just kinda disappeared.”

I didn’t disappear. I stopped reaching out to you because I find you disrespectful of my time. She is likely afraid to set boundaries around her time. She struggles with the ability to make a commitment. She can’t phone in advance or ask me to meet her somewhere where I won’t be inconvenienced by her tardiness. She rarely apologizes, yawns on the phone when she giggles over her forgetfulness and tells me it will never happen again, “can we reschedule?”

The Darker Side to Growing Online Fame

Recently someone asked the question whether if the proverbial tree actually fell if it wasn't Twittered about. I responded that I'd require Twitpics to believe the tree and the forest actually existed. Now that I am following an olio of personal friends, celebrities, and local folks I wish were my friends, I feel like I am living in a reality show. And while much of it is rooted in reality, a lot of it is staged.

I've succumbed to following celebrities on Twitter. I have no interest in following Ashton Kutcher and his struggling to be still be relevant squeeze Mrs. Kutcher (that's what she calls herself on Twitter), but the Kutchers' comments about the Twitter tv show were big news. Kutcher (Ashton said this, but presumably Demi concurs) states that a Twitter show would encourage stalking.

My question is what kind of stalking? Encourage us to hang on their every tweet, view their movies, purchase their products? Twitter stalking is highly unsatisfying and is sophisticated PR. Ethan Suplee of the now cancelled Earl (He was Randy) completely sucked me into his world with his pseudo personal tweets about his sarcastic family. He posted a Twitpic of his daughter and I went for the bait. The photo was of his daughter with her hand blocking the camera. That reminded me that Twitter are not unscripted moments for the famous. I know their publicists are in on the game. (Has Entourage shown Ari Gold on Twitter yet? If not now, then soon).

My friends who Twitter often put up tantalizing pieces of information, but unless I am actually talking to them on the phone or by DM, I'm never getting invited to all the things they talk about. Sometimes it's tempting to do a pop in when somebody I've never met says, "come out tonight," but I know they aren't talking about me. They are talking to their friends and I am an eavesdropper.

But this stalking thing is a real issue. I've known people who have gotten very enthusiastic and has started following me on every possible social networking site. One time I was chatting via gchat with a guy and then signed off- an hour later then he found me on another social media site and said "I thought you were going to bed, but here you are." But as long as he doesn't start showing up at my bbq's, it's manageable. I can't make light of this issue because I know several people who have been relentlessly followed on the internet. But I think the Ashton Kutcher's of the world might have more potential stalkers, us regular people don't have fences, moats with alligators or bodyguards to protect us.

I think those of us who are active on Facebook, myspace, Twitter and other social media have developed public personas and what is really interesting is our private lives intersect with the public. There is a lot more I can talk about, but I must get ready to go out dancing. You will know my whereabouts because I already posted updates on Twitter and Facebook.

I will develop this topic in a later blog post. I appreciate comments.

The Pain of Collateral Damage

As I mentioned in yesterday's post (okay, it was just a couple hours ago, but technically yesterday), I'm getting a divorce. I instigated it, and so I feel supremely guilty even though I recognize all the very good reasons for it and the mutuality of the things-aren't-working-ness of it. But overall I recognize how this has been the best decision I could possibly have made, and I don't for a moment regret having made it. But.

Then there's my five-year-old son.

He's part of my reason for leaving (though I would never breathe those words to him), in that for two months prior to that fateful day he asked me on a near-daily basis, "Mommy, are you sad again?" I would cry uncontrollably in front of him. I would have to leave the room, but sometimes I couldn't even manage that, and one time I crumpled up on the floor and sobbed while my sweet, darling, sensitive, smart, beloved boy watched. There is no pain that can beat that, at least in my experience--knowing I'm causing him grief, knowing I can't stop myself. I was deeply depressed, and contemplated contemplating suicide. In other words, I didn't think about me doing it, I wasn't making a plan--but I could understand why someone would. The decision to end one's life no longer seemed irrational or impossible or even necessarily wrongheaded. That scared me.

So, I got a great therapist, I got on some lovely meds, and my fog cleared. I looked at my life and saw, maybe not clear as day but perhaps clear as an early morning sunrise with the mist and the dew but the promise of blue sky later on, that I had to leave. As soon as I could, I told my husband, whom I still care for and like, that I wanted a divorce. And although this has turned my world on its ear, I haven't regretted it, for myself.

But as it sinks into my son's psyche that this is the New World Order, that Mommy and Daddy aren't going to move back in together, that ahead of him stretch years of back-and-forth from my apartment to his dad's house and vice versa, that we may have dinner together or go to the occasional party together or laugh at each other's jokes but we aren't ever going to be in bed together in the morning when he wakes up and comes into the parental bedroom for a morning snuggle--as all this happens, he's feeling all the grief and anger and frustration and pain one would expect. I'm watching it happen, and I'm trying to be as understanding and loving and supportive and open to him as possible. Even so, when his little eyes just melt into tears and he says he wishes we weren't having the divorce, I feel completely helpless.

I don't have a good story arc for this post. I wish I did, I wish I had a neat beginning, middle, and end. Oh how I want that happy end! But instead all I have is a sad little boy whose bubbling laugh--the one that makes my world go all technicolor--I hear less often, whose anger gets the best of him more often, whose sense of the world and his place in it is suddenly coming unhinged. I know it'll get better. I know I can't sacrifice my own sanity and happiness for the unsustainable illusion of a happy nuclear family. But right now I just want my boy to smile.

Day 5 - Blogger Challenge