Zorbing in Church

Melinda Nagy | Dreamstime.com

Sunday morning at Radiant we watched a video introduction to the third part of the sermon series. To illustrate The Journey Falters the video followed the seeker into the desert where rocks begin to rain down on his head. At that moment the pastor came running up the aisle with a huge “boulder” bearing down on him. It was a zorb, a giant inflatable ball painted to look like a boulder and propelled by a man inside; a bit of Cirque du Soleil in Sunday morning worship.

Twitter Block

Anthony Hathaway|Dreamstime.com

Tout is sweet, mais

c’est mute, my tweet.

Been quiet all week

I’ve nothing to speak!

Some birds announce their presence in the field with piercing, joyous cries of victory that rip through the sky and send their prey scurrying for cover. We stop and listen, enthralled. Other birds hide in trees and chirp a limited repertoire; a few notes, insistent, incessant and interminable as a car alarm or a one-radio-station small town. Annoyed, we tune them out. Then there are those that go out on a limb to deliver refreshing song on a gentle breeze. We tune our breath to their song.

I’m a new bird on the block trying to find my voice. I don’t aspire to rip the sky with awesome proclamation. I don’t want to annoy my friends. I just want to chirp a little 140 character ditty that refreshes, amuses, or inspires. Okay, truth. I also want to garner the interest of an agent, a publisher and an audience for my novel.

I’ve never suffered from writers block, but I’m developing a bad case of Twitter block (see my stats). More truth.  I’m a choral singer, happy to weave my song into the larger work.  Ask me to open my beak and emit a solo tweet and it’s not pretty.  

I don’t think I need a social media seminar. I think I need voice lessons.

Teaching old dogs new tricks

Trying to teach a really smart person how to use Facebook is tough. Husband is impressed with how in the know I am about the trivia of so many people’s lives so he asked me once again how to use Facebook. 

The last time I tried to untangle the mysteries of friending, posting, liking versus commenting, chatting and managing permissions in this volatile terrain things did not go well.  He wrote an essay in his status box and when it got rejected he took it personally. He declared the app to be stupid because it wouldn’t do what he wanted it to do. That’s the problem. His expectations are too high.

Husband thinks that Facebook is a benign application that is designed to facilitate social connections.  That’s a bit of a Trojan horse. It looks like that is the purpose but actually, it wants to alter our DNA.

George Clooney and the 10/30 window

When I get the witching hour wakeup call sometimes I reach for my latest copy of World Magazine. Not that it puts me to sleep, au contraire. The January 14^th issue is definitely not warm milk and wooly sheep.  One article that has stayed with me is a Mindy Belz essay on the 10/30 window.  According to Mindy there are 2.4 billion youth in the world that are in an extended state of adolescence.  They begin puberty around the age of 10 and are not fully formed adults until they are close to 30. That is 20 years of teenage angst!

Furthermore, your kid is more likely to find a kindred spirit in a Facebook friend from Kathmandu than she is from an older family member.  And as she and her brother will search the internet for advice before they will consult their wise elders, there’s not much opportunity for torch passing.  

Even in our Christian circles adults are no longer a treasury of wisdom and experience for children but a directory of services.

And the Oscar goes to...

Have you noticed the new set of characters popping up in stories? People who used to interact with each other now spend a fair amount of screen time interacting with digital media. What a challenge for a writer.

Writers employ exciting events to move plot lines – explosions and car chases, dialogue that reveals ulterior motives or murderous intents, scenes that employ people and nature to depict conflict. In today’s world, human characters must also interact with digital devices because they are, well, interactive.

Instead of the detectives circling the body and discussing the crime with each other, I’ve seen them turn a shoulder to the action in front of them to glue an ear to an electronic device. They talk to their partner back at the office, their mole in crime lab or the principal of their kid’s school (secondary plot line).

Do drama teachers assign students scenes to perform with in-your-face props?  

Teacher: Your cell is playing “who let the dogs out” so you know it’s your sister calling from the hospital. A tweet is coming in from your campaign manager about a big announcement and your iPad is signaling a Skype call from a name you don’t recognize – GO!

In The Elegance of the Hedgehog the annoying little French girl remarks that watching action on TV fires the same neurons in the brain of the viewer as are triggered in the actor -- our bodies actually feel what the actor feels. I feel my ear getting hot and my neck developing a crick when I see a detective on a mobile phone. When I see crowds of people walking heads down, paying no heed to the world around them I feel alone in the universe.

What would make me feel better?  I love the moment in the story when the main character gets fed up and flings his cell phone into the river.

World Views

Small town gals with big city aspirations need to push their boundaries if they want to live in a bigger world.  Technology makes it possible for us to live in rural landscapes and still find ourselves at the table with the movers and shakers.

Last week I got an email invitation to join the Associate Publisher of World Magazine and other subscribers for lunch in San Francisco.  Let me digress: When I moved to the top of the mountain I invested in subscriptions to two publications I consider journalistic epitomes, the Wall Street Journal and World Magazine, to help me stay up to date on world events.  So when I got an email invitation from Warren Cole Smith I dialed Chili’s in Millbrae into my GPS and pointed my Buick West.

Only in the Age of Technology could I enter a room full of strangers and be greeted by Michelle with these words: Cherie says to tell you “hi.”  Cherie is my sister.  She and Michelle have never met face to face but they know each other through WorldMag.com forums. Small world, isn’t it?

I sat with Michelle from Santa Rosa, CA on my left, the CEO of God’s World Publishing Company from North Carolina across the table, and a homeschooling mom of four who lives on a ranch in Dixon, CA on my right. As it turns out, Michelle works for a literary agency. She has written her spiritual memoir and published a book, A Log Cabin Christmas. It made the New York Times Bestsellers List in September.  As it happens, I am circulating the manuscript of my first novel, The Sheepwalker. She graciously gave me her card.

So, who are the World Magazine subscribers? By in large they aren’t Northern Californians. World represents a conservative Christian viewpoint.  Now I’m a Christian with conservative leanings and a U.C. Berkeley education. Go Bears! I majored in English and muddied the waters with Master’s level education in Mass Communications.  If I were forced to express my philosophy of life in one word, it would be “balance.”

So I asked World Magazine CEO Kevin Martin how he would characterize the magazine’s editorial style. He thought a moment and said, “thoughtful and reasonable.” He offered this illustration.  A faction of his readers were upset that World did not cover the brouhaha over Obama’s citizenship.  There is no reasonable evidence to suggest our President is not a U.S. citizen. It is not news.

This is what I love about Christianity. Regardless of how we might like to think the world works, there are principles at play that are unaffected by our desire to see things our way. I think Kevin’s words, thoughtful and reasonable, are the fulcrum that balance opposing world views.  If we present our viewpoints in thoughtful, reasonable ways we can hear and be heard.  God will sort out the truth.

Push your boundaries.  Give an ear to what is thoughtful and reasonable and I don’t think you can go wrong.

Circling Facebook

Fool’s give you reasons. Wise men never try. I wanted to post this on my facebook page today but decided it is more appropriate to be enigmatic on a blog. And, it’s a nice lead-in to a discussion about facebook, which I promised two new acquaintances I would do on my blog.

I met these delightful women at a reception at the top of the Transamerica Building in San Francisco. After exploring our various connections – we’re all passionate about what we do – pharmacology, hedge fund management and writing; we all love cities on the water – San Francisco, Seattle and Stockholm; and we’re all mystified by where facebook is taking interpersonal communications. In particular, one woman posed this question. Why are so many people willing to broadcast their personal information?

I opened a facebook account for two reasons.  I wanted to understand social media and I wanted to understand my kids. My son and daughter-in-law use facebook to keep track of each other, sometimes when they are sitting in the same room.  I see the discussions they have about myriad mundane issues – clogged sinks, who will do the dinner dishes, who’s tired and headed for bed; facebook has been criticized for banality but it’s the pedestrian nature of their conversation that delights me. I have access to the information that the tomato vines survived the hornworms and the surf was good on Saturday morning. I see that all is right in their world.  

It is interesting to contemplate that the song, There must be 50 ways to leave your lover, was written before the advent of social media, so now, counting email and twitter, we can add at least three more ways to that list. If we open a discussion about what is happening in our lives to the full spectrum of our personal network, is that a good thing or a bad thing?  It tests the waters of who is interested enough to comment and indeed, they may have valuable feedback. (That’s how I found a mechanic when my car developed a new rattle and my husband was out of town.)

Facebook seems to serve many functions, from back-fence gossip to the venting or validation of emotions. Being a writer, I can understand the value of wanting to edit your words before you place them in the public arena. You can’t take back what you’ve blurted out at the height of emotion. You can wordsmith a tweet or delete an ill-chosen posting before it’s done too much damage. So maybe there is some element of control at work here that might be missing in a face to face encounter.

A good test of appropriateness remains what I learned in Journalism 101.  Play it as a headline. If you have any question about words you feel led to share/ actions you feel compelled to take, write it out in your mind as a newspaper headline.  Hornworms attack early vines, stir debate over pesticides seems acceptable. French banking magnate jailed for attacking maid in hotel room – I just shake my head. Morality aside, if he’d taken 10 seconds to write that headline before he dropped his towel, he might have made a better decision.

Invasion

General Petraeus tried to Skype me. I’m not kidding. Perhaps he needed my advice on exit strategies. As I don’t trust myself with the nation’s peace plan, I blocked him from ever contacting me again.


I now get regular updates on what fast food establishment provides nutrition to my husband’s cousin in Arkansas. I fully expect reports on what she ordered and how much she left on her plate in the new Facebook rev, that should be happening in, say, the next two minutes.

Facebook commandeered information from my profile and now Bob Dylan is my pal.

My favorite TV programs ping me regularly with mundane chat about things like what Alicia is going to wear to court next week. (It got about 30,000 thumbs up. That many people care? I hope they aren’t on the General’s contact list.)

We were very patient during the elections with the dinnertime phone calls from Mike Huckabee and Ronald Reagan Jr. (Who calls my liberal friends, I wonder.) I was even a bit intrigued bya live town hall meeting that left a recording on my telephone answering machine. How else would this misplaced city girl ever hear about the irrigation woes of my central valley farmer neighbors? And how interesting that Meg and Carly knew so much about what the farmers were talking about.

The latest is that my son sent me a recording he made; I clicked on it and it played in iTunes and then iTunes invited me to ping – follow my son’s recordings, I assumed. But no; I clicked on ping and got invited to connect to the music loving universe. Scared that I might spend the rest of my days with soundtrack accompaniment not of my choosing, I shut down my computer.

I wonder, where will all this go in 2011? I love being connected. I hate being invaded. I think there is a good Pixar animation movie in here somewhere.

Cheap Scissors

I buy cheap scissors and litter them on desks and countertops all over the house where they will be accessible when I want to separate a return form from a meeting notice, slice the top off a vacuum sealed pack of salami or stab at a foil-wrapped card of allergy pills. But when I reach for them, they aren’t there.
Apparently cheap scissors have a Facebook page where they announce nocturnal gatherings in my kitchen drawers. They get together, party all night and when I finally track them down, they are piled on top of each other like an exhausted mosh pit.
Why haven’t the prayer beads I lost showed up in the drawer to evangelize these lost scissors? And my ivory carved elephant earrings, made in France, purchased for $4 in a Berkeley head shop, stolen by a babysitter – why haven’t they used the sponsored links on Google to find and reunite with me?
I must admit, my cheap scissors do not break out in a chorus of “Once I was lost, but now I am found!” when I locate them in their nefarious nest behind my silverware organizer. If I pull them out by their blades, warn them about the pitfalls of mob behavior and attempt to restore them to a purposeful existence they disappear again as soon as I turn my back.
So I’ve decided to try something different. Maybe more is not better, better is better. If I pay good money for a quality pair of scissors, one with ergonomic eye rings, a properly threaded lower shear blade, an upper shear blade with a finely beveled back and a cutting edge that is, well cutting edge – they might not want to run off and huddle with the buck-and-a-quarter riff-raff.
Scissors formed of hot forged cutlery grade steel might appreciate their place of prominence on my counter. A quick internet search led me to KnifeCenter.com where I can choose from 283 models, each with a different purpose.
This could be a slippery slope.