Ten Dollar Thoughts

A year ago I would have cared very little about the ensuing battle over “net neutrality.”  I would have been content to let the big players fight it out either in the court of public opinion or, more likely, actual court, and wait for the verdict to be handed down.  As it is, that is still what will happen (I am not even a two-bit player on the World Wide Web) but I have a dog in the fight these days.

The moment I launched this little blog such issues suddenly mattered to me (even if I didn’t realize it at the time).  This site is exactly the type of site that would not get priority treatment in the new internet landscape that is being floated.  If I care that I can easily post and you can easily read, then I want to make sure that the web facilitates that transaction.

At any rate, net neutrality is not really my point today.  Rather, in all of my observation of the coverage of the net neutrality battle, I came across this interview with Eric Scmidt, the CEO of Google.

In it, Schmidt talks about the dangers of online anonymity.  Specifically he says, “In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you.”  This freaked me out a little at first.  There are all sorts of things that I wouldn’t want made public.  What if I Google an old boyfriend?  What if I look up the procedure for declaring bankruptcy?  What if I look up the symptoms of some horrible disease?  (All of the above are hypothetical, by the way.)

Then I read Schmidt’s follow up comment: 

“Privacy is incredibly important,” he said, adding, “Privacy is not the same thing as anonymity. It’s very important that Google and everyone else respects people’s privacy. People have a right to privacy; it’s natural; it’s normal. It’s the right way to do things.”

And this commentary struck a chord with me.  As I thought about it I realized that many of us (at least myself, for sure) have long equated online anonymity with online privacy.  I can go just about anywhere on the web and unless my computer is hacked no one will ever know.  While that is a monumental comfort to many internet users who are up to no good (What, there are people online other than touchy-feely bloggers?  No.  Couldn’t be…) as Schmidt says, it’s dangerous.

There is a lot of private information about me out in the world.  It resides in places like my doctors’ offices, my HR department’s personnel files, my tax returns, even my fingerprints.  This is not data that I want made public, but it is data that I am comfortable residing in the hands of trusted keepers.  The strange thing about the internet is that we inadvertently make lots of different parties keepers of our private information.  Google.  Amazon.  Yahoo.  These major sites are some of the biggest players.  But any site where you’ve made an online purchase has data about you on file as well. 

In the pre-internet world I could walk into a bookstore and make a purchase without anyone logging that purchase into a catalog of previous purchases that is constantly evolving into a user profile designed to predict my preferences.  I still can.  But if I order my books online (more likely) I have to be comfortable with the knowledge that Amazon.com is amassing volumes of data about my shopping and purchasing habits.  They are one of my keepers now. 

While I think Eric Schmidt raised some eyebrows with his comments about online anonymity, I actually think he’s on the right track.  Online anonymity has facilitated all kinds of atrocities in the real world (look up some back episodes of Dateline if you’re curious…).  Online privacy, on the other hand, will protect those of us who are harmless yet don’t care to have our affairs made public.  The tricky part is deciding whom to make our keepers.  It’s hard to trust someone you’ve never met.  And yet we do it here in cyberspace every single day.

I am 32 years old.  A spry young thing in the greater landscape of the human experience, right?    I’m still younger than most of my coworkers.  I’ve only had to pluck one grey hair.  And on most days I have the energy to keep up with my one-and-a-half-year-old son.  Nevertheless, I don’t always feel so young.  Sometimes I feel downright old.

Some of my favorite examples:

• My brother-in-law (10 years my junior) didn’t know what a rotary phone was.
• In a meeting a few weeks ago we were somehow talking about how we learned of the Challenger shuttle explosion and an intern mentioned he hadn’t been born yet.
• During the opening credits of Marley and Me as REM’s “Shiny Happy People” began to play I leaned over to my brother-in-law (same BIL, he makes me feel old a lot…) and said, “I haven’t heard this song in years,” to which he responded, “I have no idea what it is.”

Moments like these make me grumble a little bit.  I remember asking my mother about “the olden days” of her childhood and naively thinking that my kids would never view my childhood era as “olden.”  We had microwaves, and Nintendo, and Swatches.  Really, how much more modern could things ever get?  Right?

Wrong.

My son will never look up a movie show time in the newspaper.  He will never have to search for a blank VHS tape.  He will never load a roll of film into a camera.  He will never mail a postcard from a vacation spot.  He will never carry an atlas in his car.  He will never wait for a friend or relative at the gate in the airport.    He will not buy new music on CDs.  He will never know a world without cell phones.  He will never even know the crackling sounds of dial-up internet service connecting.

And while it is a cathartic cliché to reflect on the ways in which the world has changed around us, these changes don’t create that large a cultural divide between us and those around us who are a generation older or younger.  My grandfather has learned how to e-mail and my mother has learned how to program her Tivo.  I have learned how to use Facebook.  And someday IEP will adopt something that hadn’t been conceived of during his childhood.  We all learn.

But in scanning headlines yesterday I came across this article which discusses how college mindsets are trending with time.  Beloit College has tracked these changes for the past 13 years in an effort to help college professors continue to relate to students whose cultural markers are vastly different from their own.  Some examples from the list:

For students starting college this year…

• Fergie is a pop star, not a princess
• Have never seen a carousel of Kodachrome slides
• Ruth Bader Ginsberg has always been on the Supreme Court
• Clint Eastwood is better known as a sensitive director than Dirty Harry

How fascinating and challenging it must be to spend your days trying to mold young minds using cultural reference points that draw blank stares.  How frustrating it must be not to speak their language.  The college years are at their best when book knowledge is augmented by personal experience; when someone who is older can hearken back to your own age and convey a sense of sameness based on shared experience.  Yet how do we convey the essence of a shared experience when the external trappings of that experience are so different?

Higher education is an imperfect institution on many levels.  But when it’s done right it’s a perfectly beautiful thing.  I admire Beloit College for taking these steps to bridge a generational gap.  Maybe some 19-year-old kid will walk out of a Modern American History class later this fall and feel like his professor isn’t so out of touch after all.

Last week I picked up a copy of Newsweek at the gym and read this article on marriage as I pedaled away on the elliptical machine.  With my wedding band firmly affixed to my sweating left hand I read two women’s assertions as to why today’s woman doesn’t need marriage as her mother and grandmother did.  Further, authors Jessica Bennett and Jesse Ellison argue that the institution is an utterly outmoded thing of the past. 

The statistics in their article collectively make a good case:

• We can support ourselves without a man’s salary.
• Americans have the highest divorce rate in the Western world.
• For every year that we delay marriage our chances of divorce go down.
• Due in large part to the efforts of same-sex couples, heterosexual couples now enjoy more rights as an unmarried couple than ever before.
• With 41% of 2008’s births coming from unwed mothers the stigma attached to having children out of wedlock has almost completely lost its stigma.

These and other points in the article did not surprise me.  I don’t have to look around for very long to see that the landscape of the American family isn’t today what it was for Ward and June Cleaver or for Cliff and Claire Huxtible.  What did surprise me was my own reaction to the premise that marriage isn’t necessary.  I didn’t disagree with it.

I am happily married.  Once GAP and I had been dating for several years and knew that our futures would be forged together, it never entered my mind not to get married.  It was, without question, what we wanted.  The wedding lived up to all of the romantic ideals of my girlhood.  And the marriage has seen better, worse, richer, poorer, sickness, and health.  As I sit here today I cannot envision a life in which GAP and I are in a committed, monogamous relationship but not married.  Yet I cannot articulate why.

As I read the Newsweek article I found myself with neither words to defend my decision to marry, nor a desire to defend it in the first place.  By the time I reached its conclusion my thoughts trended along the lines of, “Hmmm.  Well I guess it’s not for everyone.”  It was in the same vein as “Some people like vanilla and some people like chocolate.”  But shouldn’t a topic like this trigger a more vigorous response than a comparison of ice cream flavors?  Shouldn’t I want to passionately advocate for the decision that changed my life and has served me so well?  Is there a point at which our levels of tolerance and dismissal of social constructs become destructive to our culture?

The rub for me is that the social constructs that I value – family, community, education, support networks, and the like – do not suffer in the absence of marriage.  Bennett and Ellison write:

Research shows that the more education and financial independence a woman has—in other words, the more success she has outside the home—the more likely she is to stay married. (In states where fewer wives have paid jobs, for example, divorce rates tend to be higher.) But when these egalitarian, independent couples decide not to marry at all, they lose none of that stability. Just take a look at couples in Europe: they’re happier, less religious, and more likely to believe that marriage is an outdated institution, and their divorce rate is a fraction of our own. Not being married may make it slightly easier to walk away—at least legally—but if you’ve gone to the lengths to establish a life together, is it really all that different? Studies show that never-married couples with the intention of forever are just as likely to stay together as married ones. And for all the talk of marriage being good for families, a study of the Scandinavian countries—where a majority of children are born out of wedlock—found that kids actually spend more time with their parents than American children do. 

And so I am left in an odd place.  I have made a huge decision about my life.  It’s a decision that affects me, my family, and my community.  I believe it was the right decision for me.  But I have absolutely no interest in promoting it to other people.  Does this mean that I walked blindly into marriage as a result of cultural norms?  And if I did, is that a bad thing?

The family landscape is changing indeed.  But I struggle to understand my own neutrality on the topic.

Today’s post goes out to my sister Anne, whose practical blog Life in Pencil has been telling me for more than a year now about the merits of letting ourselves evolve organically and embracing life’s unforeseen changes. 

Since we got married six years ago, GAP and I have had an every-other-year approach to vacation planning.  Even numbered years were international trips.  Odd numbered years were domestic trips.  In that time we’ve covered Hawaii, Cardinals Spring Training, Maine, San Francisco, New York (3 times), Italy, Cancun, Switzerland, and the Pacific Northwest.  We love to travel and both get heavily invested in planning and experiencing each trip we take. 

This year’s trip (even numbered year = international destination) was to have been Ireland and Scotland.  We were going to go in the fall.  The British countryside would be lush and cool.  The pubs would be jovial.  The castles would be ancient.  And the beers would be room temperature.  (You can’t win them all.)  Alas, the best laid plans of mice and men… 

GAP and I have spent the better part of the last six months commenting to each other that we really need to have the house tuckpointed.  We have a bit of plaster damage in two rooms and before it becomes any more unsightly or irksome than it already is the exterior bricks need to be replaced and sealed.  To add insult to crumbly plaster, we also need a new roof.  Being responsible consumers as we are, we’ve gotten several bids for each set of work and the results are in.  The verdict?  Expensive. 

As the bids trickled in over the past few weeks we slowly began reconciling ourselves to the fact that our UK trip should probably be postponed.  Fast forward to last Thursday and GAP dreams up the idea of a four-day trip to the coast as a substitute.  I was delighted at the thought of a getaway and gave him the go-ahead to start scouting around online. 

Fast forward again to today and I’m so excited at what we’ve cooked up that I’m already over the disappointment of kissing our original plans goodbye.  Later this summer we will fly to San Diego for four days of the zoo, Sea World, the beach, and what I expect to be outstanding Mexican food.  Not only that, but we will be joined by some of our dearest friends (whom we haven’t seen in a year and who have had their first baby in that time).  Further still, in a stroke of brilliant happenstance, GAP’s sister and her family will be there at the same time and the entire lot of us is planning a collective day at the beach.  I’m so excited I can hardly sit still!

If life always played out as planned we would not have to deal with such headaches as home repairs and resource constraints.  But as we accepted and then embraced each of those fates we’ve ended up with plans that might actually be better.  (Kudos primarily go to GAP – it was his idea in the first place and he transformed it from whim to reality in less than 48 hours.)  Not to mention the fact that the unexpected nature of these plans makes them even sweeter.

As Anne and her blogging partner Elizabeth have so eloquently explained on their site,

Life is a series of revisions.  As soon as we think we have it all figured out, life reminds us that nothing is permanent, and we have to be willing to rewrite our plans.  And it’s this unpredictability that makes life exciting, novel, and, yes, messy.   Life requires flexibility, ingenuity, and acceptance, because there is no “final draft”.  We’re in a constant state of rewriting our lives.

Apparently, after reading their words for the past year the message has finally sunk in.  Perhaps I should allow my plans to get roiled more often.  At least in this case, I must say I rather like the results.

When our most recent issue of The Atlantic arrived in the mail the other day I was excited to read it.  The cover story is entitled “The End of Men: How Women Are Taking Control – of Everything.”  I felt empowered just by reading the title.  I couldn’t wait to see what feminist conquest awaited my eager eyes inside. 

For the most part, I wasn’t disappointed.  The article (which is long, but absolutely worth reading in full) dropped frequent statistics about how the ascent of women in the workplace positively correlates to increase economic success nationally; how women will earn three bachelor’s degrees for every two earned by men; how women dominate all but two of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most in the next decade; and so on.  Bring on the girl power, right?  Well, maybe not.

As I made my way through the article I began feeling less empowered and more depressed.  While there is a certain vindication in knowing that we’ve finally arrived at a place where brains are valued over brawn, reading about the degradation this has caused in the male workforce brought a twinge of sadness with it.  Those feelings of regret were compounded when I learned that this phenomenon disproportionately affects blue-collar male workers, who lose not only their incomes, but their entire identities, when the economy no longer requires their services. 

Apparently part of the reason for this growing gender gap (for the first time in America’s history, women now make up more than 50% of the workforce) is that women have proved more adaptable than men. 

Over the course of the past century, feminism has pushed women to do things once considered against their nature—first enter the workforce as singles, then continue to work while married, then work even with small children at home. Many professions that started out as the province of men are now filled mostly with women—secretary and teacher come to mind. Yet I’m not aware of any that have gone the opposite way.

The article goes on to trace this gender gap back to education.  Women earn more bachelor’s and master’s degrees than men.  They earn half of all medical and law degrees.  And they earn 42% of all MBAs.  Women in undergraduate programs interviewed for the article commented on their male counterparts’ lack of commitment to a major, and confessed that they fully expected to be the primary – or in some cases only – breadwinner in their marriages.  One of the many reasons for the classroom gender gap seems to be that traditional classroom settings, beginning at the elementary age, focus largely on sustained periods of sitting still and focusing on highly verbal curricula.  This environment is, evidently, much more conducive to girls’ learning style than boys’.

And so it is that we’ve arrived at a place where women are finally surpassing men in achievements both academic and professional.  But the sadness sets in when I stop to think that this wasn’t ever the goal of feminism, was it?  Of course there have been moments of the past 40 years in which women secretly or overtly wished to dominate their male counterparts.  But I count such sentiments as the natural over-correction resulting from generations of marginalization.  The true aim of feminism was equality.  What women have always wanted was equal opportunity, equal pay, and equal value. 

I find this recent turning of the tables to be every bit as problematic as the trials faced by the women of my mother’s generation and every generation before her.  Perhaps the idea of wielding power over men is captivating for a moment.  But it is no more a solution for women to be disproportionately valued by the workforce today than it was for men to have been valued yesterday. 

The one caveat to all of this is that men are not being denied opportunities today in the way that women were in the past.  We all have the same choices on the table in front of us.  Adapting to a changing economy is a challenge for anyone.  Raising a family while working one job and attending night school is a nightmare scenario in the best of circumstances.  But women have signed up for that very nightmare time after time.

A 2005 survey of lower-income adults in college revealed that:

Men, it turned out, had a harder time committing to school, even when they desperately needed to retool. They tended to start out behind academically, and many felt intimidated by the schoolwork. They reported feeling isolated and were much worse at seeking out fellow students, study groups, or counselors to help them adjust. Mothers going back to school described themselves as good role models for their children. Fathers worried that they were abrogating their responsibilities as breadwinner.

So what do we do now?  It seems incumbent upon us as a society to harness the intelligence and productivity of a complete workforce.  But how do solve the problems of insecurity, fear, initiative, and commitment?  Should we compromise our standards?  Surely not.  Should we leave men to struggle as the gender gap widens?  Probably not. 

And so we are left with a conundrum we’ve never faced.  I don’t have the answer.  But I suggest we don’t wait four or five generations to start looking for it.

IEP has had a thing for pacifiers since the very beginning.  As a NICU baby he wasn’t allowed to nurse for the first few days of his life and a pacifier was the only acceptable stand-in.  He attached quickly.  Since then, it has been a wonderful tool.  In the early days it was priceless for long car rides, naps, and general fussiness.  More recently it has been helpful keeping him quiet during church, and for the funny and guilty smile he makes when he finds a stray one that he knows is off limits except for sleep time.

I asked our pediatrician at his 15-month appointment what the drop-dead age is for pacifiers.  She told us we were fine as long as he was weaned from it by two years.  I decided right then that 18 months would be our cutoff.  (That was after deciding, and then rescinding my decision, that nine months and twelve months would be our cutoffs.)  And this weekend we did the deed.  After a grandparent visit including a big zoo trip and lunch out, he was exhausted by the time his nap rolled around on Saturday.  For the first time, we put him down sans pacifier.  He cried for about three minutes and then crashed.  We repeated the routine for Sunday’s nap.  Then last night he went down for the night without it.  Again, he cried for about three minutes and then went right to sleep.

I have been both surprised and not surprised at how easily this transition has gone.  (“Is going” – don’t want to count the proverbial chickens quite yet…)  For a baby who’s never had to fall asleep with an empty mouth, this change hasn’t been altogether a non-event.  But it hasn’t been much of an event either.  He’s an adaptable kid and takes to new situations with relative ease.  But despite his flexibility, I know that at some level this change is hard for him.

Last night as I laid him down crying (after having declined his pacifier request) I started thinking about what pacifies me.  Thankfully, it’s not a silicone nipple tethered to a clip on my shirt.  But I – we all – have things in my life that soothe me.  I have things in my life that are familiar, on which I lean and rely, and which could be considered crutches in moments when I reach for them out of fear. 

A cell phone.  Internet access.  My mother on the other end of the telephone.  Leather handbags in a rainbow of colors.  Sloppy kisses from giant furry dogs.  A squeeze of my husband’s strong hand.  All these things, in various moments of stress or insecurity bolster me against my fears. 

So how would I feel if, over the course of a weekend, someone decided it was high time I was weaned off any of these things?  I wondered about this and tried to distinguish for myself what the difference is between IEP’s pacifier and any of my own soothing vices.  I drew the line in a shade of grey.  I can handle most any situation without my own creature comforts.  Naturally, strife-filled moments are easier with them.  But I can rise to the occasion on my own when called upon.

What I didn’t want for IEP was for his pacifier habit to become so ingrained that it was a prerequisite for sleep – or any other brand of satiety.  It’s not so much that I don’t want him to have it, it’s that I don’t want him to need it.  With toddlers such nuances are difficult to convey, which is why it plays out in shades of black and white.  But ultimately it’s the coping skill that I want to develop, more than the crutch that I want to eliminate. 

But yet we all have such needs.  We can never truly eliminate our need for the objects and attachments that aid us in trying times.  And just as surely as his attachment to his pacifier fades, his attachment to something else (something more toddler-esque, something more socially acceptable for a boy his age?) will develop.  So why such a big deal about the pacifer?  (Aside from the fear of massive orthodontia?)  I’m not sure.  But I know that the experience he’s having in giving up something now will be repeated many times throughout his life.  Giving up our nanny someday.  Giving up his preschool.  Giving up his favorite pajamas.  Giving up a girlfriend (in the dim and distant future!).  So perhaps it is the experience of sacrifice and change that we’re fostering, as much as a shift to new objects of comfort.   

These little moments of parenting sneak up on me from time to time.  I watch my son traverse a poignant moment in life and extrapolate its significance out to an adult level.  There is much to be gained in considering our challenges from a child’s perspective.  It takes the muddied waters of adulthood and clarifies them with concision.  As I’ve watched him relinquish his pacifier so easily, I am prone to wonder what it is that I hang onto but could just as easily dismiss.

It is the word of chances and risks.  It is the word of new and different.  It is a word that is both affirming and terrifying.

Yes.

Yes is the frightening answer to so many questions:

Do I want to learn a new language?
Do I want to live overseas again?
Do I want to have more children?
Do I want to work for myself someday?
Do I want to travel extensively? 

Yes is also the comforting answer to many other questions:

Do I have a family I love and adore?
Am I happy in my life?
Do I have hobbies I enjoy?
Am I in good health?
Is my marriage sturdy? 

Yes is a word that simultaneously feels like a warm blanket and a cold breeze.  I wrap myself in it, and brace myself against it.  I fear it and yearn for it in the same moment.  It takes me to new places in my life, some of which are beloved, and some of which are mistakes.  It teaches me to embrace my fumbles and falters.  It rewards me with unexpected blessings.  It hovers over me like a guardian and haunts me like a ghost. 

I answer yes in my life because I am better for it.

This post was inspired by the topic of Yes and is a part of Momalom’s Five for Ten.  For more great posts on Yes click on over and check out the links.

There is the life I have.  And there is the life I want.  Much of the time they look a lot alike.  But there are times when real life takes a back seat to dream life and I spend a handful of days contemplating something I wish I had.  This happens every time I go to New York. 

On Thursday morning GAP and I loaded up into a cab, said goodbye to IEP (who was much more interested in the presence of said cab than in the fact that Mama and Dada were leaving in it), and motored to the airport.  Leaving my baby behind was difficult, but was eased by thoughts of a weekend of sleeping in, dinners with friends, shows, baseball games, and drooling over my favorite city in the world. 

It’s not the bright lights that get to me.  It’s the aggregated experience of a thousand little things that I love: The smell of street food, the brownstones, the pre-theatre menus, the way the park fills up on a sunny afternoon, the strollers everywhere, hearing more foreign languages than English being spoken around me, and the normalizing effects in being in a place where you are almost always in the middle of any demographic continuum. 

When I’m in New York I feel like a child with her face pressed up against the glass of a beautiful window display.  I want what I see, but it doesn’t (at least right now) belong to me.  I imagine myself there, not as a vacationer, but as a resident.  I dream up scenarios about what kind of life I would have.  And I contemplate how serious I am about all of these daydreams.

And then I come home.  I come home to my sturdy house, my affectionate dogs, and my perfect son.  I come home to a city that is comfortable and familiar.  I come home to a place that knows me as well as I know it.  I come home to a life that is good and happy and satisfying.  And I wonder if I’m being unreasonable.  All this lusting after a life I’ve invented in my head, is it innocent or not?  Living a life that wants for nothing, am I an utter ingrate to think about a life that might offer more? 

I’d like to find some tidy conclusion to these questions.  I’d like to say that I’ve thought them through, arrived and an answer and say The End.  But I haven’t, and so I will end this post honestly by saying that I don’t know.  I know what I think I want.  I don’t know if it will meet my expectations if I someday have it.  And I don’t know if I have any business wanting anything more than the life I already have.  Wanting more is a tricky thing.  It helps us strive.  But it also suggests that the here and now aren’t good enough.  And, at least for me, that isn’t completely true. 

This post was inspired by the topic of “lust” as a part of Momalom’s Five for Ten week.  I was a little late in getting my link for Friday’s topic of “Memory” posted, so if you missed it, scroll down or click here.

Sometimes we are brave.  Other times we are stupid.  And other times still the latter is redeemed by a shot at the former.

In the fall of 1997 I was 20 years old and a sophomore in college.  I had a fun roommate, a good group of girlfriends, and a boyfriend who made my post-adolescent heart go pitter-patter.  I also had the hair-brained idea of spending the spring semester of that year abroad in Spain.  I had no idea what I was doing.  It was the best mistake I ever made.

If I could talk with my twenty-year-old self today I would tell her that going abroad will unequivocally wreck everything in her life that she thinks matters.  I would tell her:  While you are gone your friends will bond in meaningful ways without you, and when you return you will be decidedly out of the loop.  While you are gone the boyfriend that you’re so in love with will decide that he doesn’t really miss you all that much, and he will break up with you after you get back (while you’re in the middle of a solo cross-country road trip to Wyoming, no less).  While you are away you will be mind-numbingly and heart-breakingly lonely.  You will feel isolated and alienated and sad.  You will call your friends’ dorm rooms when you know they’re in class, just to hear the bubbly voices on their answering machines without having to talk about how you wish you were back there.  You will have moments when you won’t admit even to yourself how unhappy you are. 

And… you should absolutely go!

The caveat to all of those statements is that they will only be true for the first half of the semester.  Here are the other things that are true:  You will rediscover your love of reading and devour some of the best fiction of your life.  You will master another language and feel a kinship to it that you never expected.  You will learn how to be alone, in moments that are lonely and moments that are not.  You will find the joys of traveling on your own.  You will eventually make friends who enrich your experiences and make you laugh.  You will spend a weekend on the beaches at Nerja and sunbathe topless.  You will stop caring about what the cool kids think.  You will spend three days in Barcelona chatting up waiters and eating dinner at bar tables while reading.  You will find out-of-the-way restaurants and order local specialties.  You will drink red wine from a glass bong and ask your waiter to take a photo of you doing it.  You will take hold of this experience and mold it into something you want it to be.

Because you have no other option, you will be brave.

Courage is a funny thing.  Sometimes we look for it and we know just what we’re doing when we step toward it.  Other times we aren’t looking for it, but it taps us on the shoulder and calls on us, and we answer with the understanding that what we are about to do may be hard.  And other times still we are stupid.  We don’t know what we’re getting ourselves into.  We have no foresight, no inkling, no foggy idea that we’re walking blindly into something big and hairy. 

But those are the moments, I think, when courage can be the most transforming; when we are caught unawares and must call up something from within ourselves that we didn’t expect to need. 

My semester abroad was perhaps the single biggest transformational experience of my life.  It was that semester that saw me evolve from a vulnerable and insecure girl into a confident and savvy young woman.  Were it not for those six months (the first three in particular) I would not be the person I am today. 

Sometimes we know that we must be brave.  Other times we are just stupid and back ourselves into corners that call for courage.  Nevertheless, it is courage that emerges.  And the fact that we arrived at a place of courage via a place of stupidity does nothing to dilute the courage itself.

This post is a part of Momalom’s Five for Ten week.  For the rest of this week, and part of next, I will be following along with their suggested topics.  For some great reads on the topics of Courage, Happiness, Memory, Lust, and Yes, be sure to check out the links to other participating bloggers’ sites on their home page.

I am participating in Momalom’s Five for Ten, but I’m slow on the uptake and forgot about their designated topics.  I will be back on the wagon with an extra post tomorrow, and another on Wednesday. 

Let’s pretend you’re a friend of mine in the real world.  (Maybe you are.)  Let’s pretend that we know each other and used to keep in close contact, but due to the obligations of career and family we don’t check in as often as we used to.  And let’s pretend I wrote you the following letter (or e-mail, we should be a little realistic) last week.

Dear Friend,

Hi there.  How’ve you been?  It’s been a few weeks since we last talked and I just wanted to say hello and let you know what I’ve been up to.  Life is, for the most part, normal, and we are all doing well. 

I finally went through the stacks of journals and letters that my mom brought up last month.  It was pretty embarrassing to read so many of my thoughts from those years.  I suppose adolescence is a cross we all must bear, but after reliving it through the journal entries, I’m glad it’s behind me.  One by one I’m throwing them out, and I have to say, it feels good.

GAP’s sister and her husband came to visit recently.  We had a great time getting caught up with them.  They hadn’t seen IEP in a while and I think they had fun playing with him.  We had a fun outing to a park one afternoon.  And Saturday night we went out to dinner and had some really interesting conversation.  I really enjoy their visits.

IEP’s sign language is coming along and I’m so thankful that he picks up new signs so quickly, since his words are coming more slowly.  We’re working hard to get him to express his needs as specifically as possible, and he does pretty well.  His 18-month check-up is coming up and I’m excited to see how much he’s grown.

Not much else to report.  Please drop me a line when you can and fill me in on your most recent ongoings.  And let’s talk soon.

Love,
Gale

Okay, now let’s pretend that instead of the e-mail above, you saw the following updates to my Facebook status.

• Ugh.  Sorting through old journals and letters this weekend.  So glad not to be in adolescence anymore. 
• In-laws coming to visit this weekend.  It’s been ages since we’ve seen them and I can’t wait.
• Weekend with in-laws was a blast.  Fun with IEP and a terrific grown-up dinner too.  Thanks for coming, guys.
• IEP is learning new signs left and right these days.  I’m so proud of him.  Keeps us all sane until he starts learning more words. 

The same basic information was communicated in both formats.  But by comparison, the FB updates seem so terse and impersonal.  They are a scattershot out to a couple hundred people who may or may not be reading, and may or may not (likely not) say anything back.  On the other hand, my oh my, is FB efficient!  In less than 30 seconds I can update scores of people on my life.  I could never write all these people an individual e-mail.  I’d have carpal tunnel and sleep deprivation within a day.  I’d feel smothered by the obligation of so much correspondence.  And after a while I’d cease to enjoy the personal touch of one-on-one communication.

Nevertheless, these days I’m really struggling with the inundation of communication that never goes deeper than a text message.  Yes, my message gets to more people more quickly via FB updates or Twitter.  But to what end?  I’ve delivered a fact.  Some people will read it.  A few of them will smile and be happy to know that I’m doing well and what I’m up to.  But what does it really accomplish for me to put my life on a virtual (and password-protected) billboard if true back-and-forth interaction never occurs?  (Yes, I understand that you can comment back and forth on FB and Twitter updates, but I don’t count that as meaningful interaction.)  Just because I know that Friend A’s trip to Vegas was a success, and Friend B ate too much cheesecake for dessert, and Friend C is stuck at the office on a Saturday doesn’t mean that a relationship exists there.  They’re all just data points.

Isn’t data, though, when shared back and forth in a thoughtful and reciprocal way what constitutes a relationship in the first place?  Why should I discriminate against this type of exchange, especially if I concede that it facilitates communication with a much broader range of people than I could ever manage on my own?  And this is exactly where I start to bang my head against the wall:

Would I rather have a fewer number of friends (or “friends”) with whom I communicate regularly and in depth?  Or would I rather stay abreast of broad swaths of people from my past but never really communicate with them?  And perhaps most perplexing of all, if I choose the former, is there anyone out there who’s willing to travel the same path?  Or has everyone migrated so thoroughly over to the FB model that I no longer have a choice? 

Every time the electronic world takes a leap forward the media jumps up and down publishing stories about how technology moves more quickly than a culture’s ability to adapt to it.  I’m finding myself in one of those moments; struggling to understand in this new landscape of friendship not only what I want, but whether it’s even available to me anymore.