Facebook 101

When I'm on Facebook, I get the feeling I'm being immersed in a different culture. I'm not multi-lingual enough to have much Facebook experience in anything other than English, but it seems that no matter which English-speaking country its "friends" are from, Facebook has a way of of corralling everyone into certain protocols, language patterns, and forms of address. In other words, it messes with the ways we might otherwise interact.

Facebook allows users to reply to one another, and when you tap "reply," to respond to someone's comment, Facebook auto-fills the other person's name. As a stickler for punctuation, I often take the extra two seconds required to insert a comma after the name before typing my reply. If I don't do that, I am nagged by the notion that I have just contributed to the breakdown of written language in Western civilization. I think Facebook should include the comma in the auto-fill so I no longer have to take time out of a busy day to either add the comma or contemplate the damage caused when I left it out. 

Many of us also use our middle names, maiden names, married names, and hyphenates of all of the above when on Facebook. This can cause a stilted lilt in our Facebook conversations. Consider:

A woman posts a picture of herself with a trendy short haircut. Such photos are usually selfies taken in the poster's car immediately after leaving the salon. One of her Facebook friends comments that the haircut has a "cute little David Cassidy vibe going on." The woman fires back with, "Emma Jane Zelinski-Masterson-Whalberg, you think I look like a guy?!?"

In its ongoing effort to clarify users' communications even further, Facebook offers a collection of emojis for reacting to a post. The options are a thumbs up, a heart, a laughing face, an awestruck face, a crying face, and a scowl-y, angry face. Facebook used to offer only the thumbs up, aka the "like" button, but broadened the choices when users found it off-putting to "like" their friends' heart-wrenching posts about the death of a beloved pet and the other kinds of heartbreaks we all endure in life. 

That just made me think of something else. Say one of my Facebook friends goes skiing at a luxury resort in the Swiss Alps. He breaks his foot and posts a picture of his bruised-up toes peeking from a cast. His post says he'll have to spend the next ten days recuperating in front of a roaring fire while drinking brandy. If I tap the heart to send my love, will people think I'm happy about the broken foot? Probably not.

But how will they know for sure?  

Imported from Detroit

I was born and raised in Pontiac, Michigan, a once thriving factory town and home of the Pontiac automobile. The last time I drove through my old neighborhood, I saw boarded-up houses and empty lots, and the streets looked like the grins of gap-toothed skulls. I sobbed all the way home. 

Photo by Liz Weddon on Unsplash

But people still live on that street, some of them my old neighbors, and where there's life there's hope. I love Pontiac. I would never have had some of my best friends and many of my happiest memories without it. 

The other day I was loading groceries into my car when a woman who was parked nose-to-nose with me yelled, "Hey! Excuse me!" I walked towards her. She was a black woman, middle-aged, with glasses and a not quite trusting smile.

"What's that mean on your windshield?"

I looked and saw that she was talking about the decal at the top reading: IMPORTED FROM DETROIT. It was there when I bought the car, used, a year or so before. The salesman explained that it was part of an auto industry marketing campaign and meant that the car was as good as any import. Once he said that, I didn't give it a second thought.

"Oh!" I smiled, oblivious to the potential for confrontation. "It was there when I bought the car. I think it's just a little poke at the imports."

"You sure it doesn't mean Detroit's no better than a third-world country?" 

She didn't look like someone trying to pick a fight. Instead, she seemed to be trying to avoid a fight when there was a possible affront staring her in the face.

My eyes got very wide. "Honestly, ma'am, I never took it that way at all, and if I'd thought that's what it meant, I would have had the salesman take it off. I bought the car used, and it was already on there. I always took it as pro-Detroit, not anti."

"Oh!" she laughed. "That sounds better to me. You see, I'm from Detroit, and I was just about to go a few rounds with you if that was your opinion!"

I smiled back. "Well, ma'am, I'm from Pontiac, and I think people like you and me ought to stick together."

"I think you're right!" she laughed. "You have a blessed day now!"

Life would be a lot better for everybody, and maybe last a lot longer for some, if we listened and talked before jumping to conclusions. 

I know that two men could have defused this tense situation just as amicably. Still, I think it's a good argument for pumping estrogen into city water supplies, just to help things along a little bit. 

  

Brown Shoes

According to the Cole Porter song, Miss Otis Regrets, the lady is saddened that she's unable to lunch because she's just gotten hauled off to the hoosegow for shooting her lover. On Saturday I regretted that I was able to lunch - and even then, it was just barely. 

Brown Shoes by Teece Aronin. Available on products at
redbubble.com/people/phylliswalter.

I have a friend I'll call F. F and I have known each other almost two years and met through the miracle of social media. Because we live roughly two hours from one another, we have communicated mostly via the Face Book game Words with Friends and texting. We did manage to meet a couple of times, one of them for dinner. Maybe you've found yourself with the same problem: you like someone, but you live so far apart that it's difficult to date like other couples. 

So back to F. One or the other of us was always dating someone else or recovering from some star-crossed stupidity into which we'd gotten sucked. 

Anyway, there we were last week, messaging back and forth, and ended up planning a date with each other. It was for yesterday. Then, in one of those, "I-have-no-idea-why-we're-texting-about-this" moments, it was decided we'd share our first kiss. He seemed enthused about the kiss and so was I. I was to drive to his house and we would go from there to a wedding reception. 

Now, I was rear-ended a few weeks ago, and my back and knees waited until recently to start collectively killing me. I've been limping, playing phone tag with my medical claims rep and having a rough time getting things done at work because of the pain. The day before the date it was almost unbearable, so I went to my doctor. I had told F that I would dance with him, but could barely get out of my car. 

"I'm going to a wedding tomorrow!" I told my doctor who wrote me a prescription for a steroid. And then it hit me that I had nothing to wear. Actually, I have very few clothes period. I think some of them are still packed from when we moved last spring. Even at work I dress very casually. So I went straight from the doctor to Marshall's where I limped my way among the racks until I came up with something nice enough for a wedding but not too dressy for work. Then I went home and collapsed. 

Three hours later, F texted to say the couple getting married hadn't received his RSVP so would I like to just meet for lunch? I was disappointed but relieved. I'd had mixed feelings about getting all dressed up and mingling with a lot of people I don't know while walking like Walter Brennan. So lunch it would be. 

That night I was feeling a little giddy about the next day, and the idea of the kiss - which in my mind had become not just the kiss, but the KISS. 

We met at the restaurant, oohed and ahhd over the pot stickers and each had a sandwich and a beer. When the bill came I asked if I could help and he said I could cover the tip if I liked, so I did that. He walked me to my car where I instantly regretted not getting to my mints beforehand. 

It occurred to me that we'd each driven more than an hour just for lunch and that maybe a first kiss in a parking lot wasn't what he'd had in mind, so I said, "I don't know what your schedule's like, but would you like to go do something else?" I was thinking a movie or a park might be a good idea.

No, he said. He had to let the dog out and a buddy was taking him out for his birthday (I had wrapped up a small birthday present for him, but forgot it at home). Then he said, "Well, I'll be seeing you," and started for his car. 

"F, would you like to kiss goodbye?" I asked.

"No, that's okay," he said, and kept walking.

I sat there for a second, a little perplexed then went after him.

"F?"

He didn't seem to have heard me and kept walking,

"Excuse me, F!" 

He turned and saw me and continued getting into his car. When I caught up to him, his car door was still open. I bent over and looked in.

"Is something wrong?" I asked.

"No, nothing's wrong."

"But you wouldn't like to kiss goodbye?"

"It's not imperative," he said, not moving except to look at me.

I straightened up, walked back to my car and got in. He was long gone before I'd even managed to get my keys in the ignition. 

I tried to keep an open mind about what just happened. We'd met before, and he had been open about his attraction to me and wanting to kiss me someday, so I didn't think it was an attraction problem. Then again, maybe it was. I started that losing battle so many of us wage in these situations, trying to think what I'd said or done to offend him. There was nothing stuck between my teeth and nothing up my nose. There were no lulls in the conversation and a lot of laughing. What happened?

Then I just felt bad and drove home. 

It's probably not fair to write about this when F and I've not talked about what happened, but for all I know, he doesn't intend to and might have no plans to discuss anything with me again. And besides, if I don't write about things like this, they pile up inside and who needs that? 

Also, F deserves the benefit of the doubt. For all I know, he chipped a tooth on a pot sticker and was too self-conscious to kiss. Or maybe he really does still like me, but didn't want the kiss to happen over his doggie bag. Or maybe the woman he'd just started dating who so far was two for three on date cancellations, texted him while I was in the ladies' room and proposed marriage. I joke, but truly, some very good reason might have occurred to him that made him change his mind.  

And like women, men have the right to change their minds and they also have the right to say no to unwanted advances. 

Imagine all the times Donald Trump must have fought women off. 

O Don't Let Me Sext When I'm Sleezy

I'm a little like the drunk who thinks he's fine to drive except that I'm the out-of-it girlfriend who thinks she's fine to text. 

Image, copyright Teece Aronin

I have a history of this kind of thing. Let's say I'm seeing a man who's on the road a lot. Invariably I'll say something like: "Text me when you get to your hotel - even if you think I'm asleep." The next day I see the text he sent at 1 a.m. then read my reply. I am absolutely mortified. 

About a year ago I was in bed with the flu when a man I was dating texted.

"What can I do to help you?" he asked - from Duluth. 

I'd been napping, was high on over-the-counter flu meds and wasn't wearing my glasses. I wrote back: "Just come on me once in a while." 

I have no idea how that happened when what I thought I wrote was, "Just check on me once in a while." Notice that some of the accidental letters in that text aren't anywhere near the intentional letters. 

There was another time when I was sleepy and sick and trying to talk to a boyfriend on the phone. Suddenly he wasn't there so I groped for the wall socket then texted to explain. I wrote: "My O just died." 

No it hadn't. My phone had just died. I was far too out of it to have had an O at that moment, but if I had, it would have just died, too. 

I'm often struck by what lovely gentlemen I've dated as not one of them pretended to notice any of the misfires including those described above. Then again, they probably wept with laughter, waved over every guy in the bar and wheezed out the words, "Look at what my passed out girlfriend just texted!" 

You know, that whole texting while sleepy thing used to embarrass me but I'm past all that. I just do my best to tap the right letter and if I happen to land anywhere within three letters of the right letter, I'm happy. 

Let men play Alan Turing to my Enigma. Let them struggle to understand me for once.

And by the way, the title of this essay is actually: Oh, Don't Let Me Text When I'm Sleepy.

I shouldn't be allowed to blog either. 

Sweet Nothings

Sometimes in marriage it’s all about timing. Take for instance, Melrose and Ed. 

This was the early sixties and Ed worked for one of Southern Michigan’s General Motors assembly plants. He was that era's quintessential “regular Joe." He went to work in clean but faded coveralls and carried a big, black, barn-shaped lunchbox. 

And like a lot of men back then, Ed just might have been a wee bit chauvinistic.

But whatever Ed’s attitudes towards women, they did not include the conviction that after work his place was with his wife. His place, Ed felt, was with his fellow assembly workers at a neighborhood drinking establishment; the cinder-block construction, neon light illumination kind of drinking establishment.

Meanwhile, Ed’s wife, Melrose was the regular wife of the regular Joe. She stayed at home even though the kids were well out of the nest, claiming she was focused on homemaking. And she maybe wasn’t quite as on top of her appearance as when she and Ed first met. 

Melrose might also have had a tendency to meet her husband at the door (on the rare occasions he came straight home) in curlers and a house dress, the bunions on her feet peeking at Ed through threadbare slippers.

So there's a chance that each of them had reason to feel a bit resentful of the other.

One night, Ed was out at the bar knocking back a few while Melrose lay in bed dreaming of Ed’s early demise, so bitter was she over his nocturnal fellowship habits. When Ed came stumbling through the back door, Melrose didn’t hear him. 

This, of course, was before the days of cell phones when a third party could pick up the phone and either join the other two parties or just listen in, provided said person's phone was in the same residence as at least one of the others. 

When the phone rang, it startled them both, Ed in the kitchen and Melrose in the bedroom. They picked up within milliseconds of one another, Melrose assuming it was Ed and Ed with no clue who it was.

They said hello in unison before Melrose yelled: “Where the hell have you been? Do you know what time it is?”

“Hell, yes, I know what time it is!” Ed yelled back. He consulted his watch but it kept swimming around in front of his face. “By the way, what time is it?”

“It’s time your drunken carcass was here where it belongs! Why the hell aren’t you home?”

“What the hell do you mean, why the hell aren’t I home? I am home and damned if it isn’t hell!”

“Well, if you’re home, get your ass in bed!”

“My ass is in bed! It’s name is Melrose!”

“Aw, go to hell!”

“No! You go to hell!”

Ed and Melrose slammed down their receivers.

A few seconds later, Ed’s boss hung up, too.