Posts tagged with "friendship" - Faerye Net

Anti-Anti-Valentine's

2013-02-15T04:05:48+00:00

It’s come to my attention that I haven’t made my position on Valentine’s Day clear: so unclear, in fact, that even my co-protagonist thinks I object to it. I don’t! I’m not anti-Valentine’s. I’m sort of mildly anti-anti-Valentine’s.

As long as you can get past the fact that two thousand years and iterations ago, it was religious, I think it’s nifty to have a holiday celebrating love! I just think the focus on romantic love is…weird and reductive. The way most romantic relationships go, you probably should be showing love on the regular anyway. But our family, especially our friends? We may not say that enough…or at all. It’s easy to be ashamed or tongue-tied about how much our friends mean to us. I’m all for another push to tell them.

This year, I’m taking part in Mary Robinette Kowal’s Month of Letters Challenge, and a few weeks ago I happened across a really ancient sheet of stickers: the plain red heart stickers that my mom must have had a bulk supply of when we were growing up. We sealed all the valentines with them for my whole childhood, as far as I can remember. It seemed like a sign to stop being lazy and send some love out this year!

Geek Social Fallacy Addendum

2009-01-02T13:51:20+00:00

The Five Geek Social Fallacies were established in 2003 by this dude named Michael Suileabhain-Wilson, and can be read in detail here. They are as follows, in short form:

Geek Social Fallacy #1: Ostracizers Are Evil
Geek Social Fallacy #2: Friends Accept Me As I Am
Geek Social Fallacy #3: Friendship Before All
Geek Social Fallacy #4: Friendship Is Transitive
Geek Social Fallacy #5: Friends Do Everything Together

My friend RockStar and I have come up with another one (as the author has always said is more than possible) which comes up a lot in our lives. It might be a corollary to #5, rather than a fallacy in its own right:

Geek Social Fallacy #6 or #5b: Friends Like All the Same Things.

I definitely am a carrier for this, though my intellectual brain rejects it. Really, people have different tastes and that’s okay. But when someone I cherish, whose opinion matters to me, dislikes something I love, there is a palpable sting. This is, of course, how this fallacy came to be formulated, for RockStar is a man of strong opinions and discerning tastes, whereas I am a woman of strong opinions and occasionally permissive tastes. There are many things I like that he doesn’t like, and it helps that we formulated this rule to remind us that it’s okay for geeks not to geek out over all the same things.

Of course, being sarcastic beggars, it doesn’t exactly play out as:

R: I think [X] is an ultimately shallow and brainless movie.
F: That’s okay, because friends don’t have to like all the same things!

It actually played out:

R: I hate Star Wars.
F: We are no longer friends!

and subsequently:

R: I think [X] is an ultimately shallow and brainless movie.
F: That’s okay, because we aren’t friends.

But we both understand it as meaning the same as the first example.

I’ve been meaning to tell ye about this Fallacy Addendum for some time, but I was spurred into action this morning by yet another Goodreads update e-mail wherein etmorpi gave a horrible rating to yet another Norby book. It’s okay that etmorpi doesn’t enjoy the antics of superpowered, whimsical and supremely confident robots made of barrels of nails. Because people are different, their expectations from literature and entertainment differ, and the landscapes of life and mind that affect any one reading of the same work render it utterly distinct from any other. Friendship is about something more lasting than mere aesthetic symmetry: about compassion, support, and overcoming difference in favor of lasting sympathy.

Or, in other words: Etmorpi, we are no longer friends!

Graceful exit

2008-07-28T08:03:10+00:00

A long time ago we used to be friends,
but I haven’t thought of you lately at all…
-The Dandy Warhols

I’m back on the friend thing.

If social networking had a cheesy 50’s film strip, the narrator would say, “Never again will you have to wonder what happened to that guy from math class. Never again will you lose track of that one really cool girl.” It’s an excellent theory – as we diffuse across countries and hop oceans, friendships can be preserved, connections strengthened despite distance. You can reconnect with people you thought you’d lost.

But on the other hand…do you still like each other? You remember drifting out of friendships during high school as your interests and personality changed. How much more have you changed since then? If you still click, that’s amazing. But maybe that one really cool girl from high school doesn’t like me anymore. Maybe your drinking buddy from college has changed religions and given up on pop culture. It’s hard to rule out until you’ve had a good look at each other’s Facebook profiles, or until you realize you’ve been ‘networked’ for six months and realizing you haven’t a word to say. And then there are the people you meet, the new friends, who you don’t end up seeing again. You move, they transfer schools or break up with your friend, and there they sit on your “Friend” list, someone you met twice and liked. Forever.

When I am thirty, how many Facebook, goodreads, or Jyte “friends” will I have, and how many of them will really want me on their list? But on the other hand, who wants to “defriend” someone on Facebook, thus transforming the world’s most passive communication device into something a bit passive-aggressive?

I propose a tapering mechanism. If someone doesn’t look at my profile, click ‘more’ on my book reviews, or otherwise exchange digital high-fives with me for six months, let me fade off their list. Maybe the system can warn them first, ask them quietly if they really want me to go. Not with a plonk but a whisper, I will fall off their friends list, off their updates and off their radar. And if they ever wonder, “What is up with that weird Felicity girl, anyway?” they can search for me anytime. They can read my blog, shrug, and move on. We aren’t friends anymore, and that’s okay.

Blog Buddies

2005-10-12T19:57:20+00:00

Perhaps I’m morbid…actually, scratch that, I know I’m morbid. At any rate, one of the symptoms thereof is that sometimes, I wonder what would happen to my blog if I were to die. One of its functions, after all, is to prove I was here, that I did something, even if it was silly…even if I never get a novel published, here’s my existential impression upon the world. If I die and stop paying domain fees, will anyone save the contents for posterity? Will they keep them on the web, or just make copies for my family and friends?

Yes, I have actually pondered these things. But stop backing away slowly, this is actually a point that should be pondered. All over the world, people pick up blogs and put them down, like children with fad toys. What if someone’s blog is really GOOD and they stop updating it? Don’t you wonder what happened to them? I know I’ve wondered sometimes, when Baghdad Burning goes a long while un-updated. I don’t know that girl’s real name (and even if I did, good luck finding reliable civilian casualty lists). How do I know whether there’s just even less electricity and telephone than usual in her suburb of Baghdad, or whether she’s part of a scrolling headline on CNN?

So here’s what I propose. All you folks with blogger blogs and diaryland blogs and so forth — choose someone you really trust (preferably someone you don’t think will be in the car if your car is struck by a meteor) and give them your blog password. Then, if you ever die, the untold millions that doubtless troop by and appreciate your humanity will be advised of your mortality. It’s like ‘porn buddies’ on Coupling. Except instead of moving your porn before your bereaved parents see it, they let the internet know that your comic book has become a graphic novel, that the intrinsically serial medium has stopped its series.

I don’t like to think about the vast waste of abandoned blogs frozen in time, proclaiming the sharpness and immediacy of thoughts and concerns long gone. It’s eery. Even I am not that morbid.