Facebook

The First, perhaps to become annual, Social Media Day


is today. Or so Facebook and The Bloggess tell me. And that alone makes it true.

I’m not so sure the advent of Social Media as a primary venue for human interaction is something to get all “rah-rah” about. After all, it can only lead to this in the end:

If it hasn’t already for some of us.

Not knocking the brave new world. I met my husband on the Internet, as some of you know, and many good friends exist only across time and space with the help of powerful satellites and Al Gore.

Just a caution I’m throwing out.

So, happy social media day. IM or text your favorite virtual friend. Tweet goodwill to all and update that neglected status bar for the hundreds and hundreds of people you’ll never meet.

But consider taking a walk and doing some Sun Salutations while you’re at it.

Namaste.

Hate Groups on Facebook


One of the side effects of friending your friends, family and semi-random strangers on Facebook are the things they post on your wall or feed. Too much information is a given and I am certainly guilty of this myself. And not just on Facebook.

Around Family Day (that’s Presidents’ Day to you Americans – our holiday being apolitical and applicable to more than simply government employees) I began to notice that many of my teacher friends from my Iowa days of yore were joining a Facebook group called “Keep Legend’s American Grill Teacher (and Customer) Free”.

I am familiar with the restaurant. It’s part of a chain that is locally owned. I used to eat at its Firecreek off-shoot when I lived in the Jordan Creek area of West Des Moines. They are customers, in fact, of my BFF’s husband. He supplies them with paper products, glass ware and such. I think they are one of his biggest accounts, so a boycott movement would have a direct impact on my BFF and her family in a negative way that no one needs during a recession.

But I didn’t know specifics and didn’t really look into it. Iowa is far away from my life, and Facebook groups are white noise on my home page.

Sunday, I was glancing through the Des Moines Register’s op-ed’s and stumbled upon a piece about this boycott group and discovered that the idea for the boycott began with a teacher who found a hair in her salad.

Yeah. I was a little under-whelmed in the outrage department too.

Who HASN’T found a hair when eating out at some point?

It turns out that a group of teachers chose Legend’s for their lunch break during a recent DMPS teacher conference held at the city’s convention centre. One of them, Marsha Richards, who teaches at one of the high schools, found a hair in her salad and reported said hair to their waitress. In typical American service sector style the waitress said,

“Well I didn’t put it there.”

Again, where’s the outrage? This idea that wait staff, salespeople, housekeepers, and other minimally paid people are servants is widespread in my native land and that when they slip out of character (yes’um, dat’s a hair alright. I is mighty sorry I didn’t ‘spect the greens afore I served ’em) then … well …. middle class entitlement has a fury that hell flinches away from.

Perhaps that isn’t fair? Maybe. I don’t really expect much from service workers in terms of subservience and I am not at all surprised anymore when I ran across those who are having horrid days. Customers seem to think that the little bit of cash they are throwing around should buy them sniveling bootlickers.

The salad, by the way, was comped, but the request for the manager never produced one. Apparently, the restaurant was unaware of the conference and the fact that they were going to be mobbed for lunch. Normally, the downtown is quiet. Dead in fact. Legend’s was understaffed and if I know teachers let loose for lunch on a “school day” – and I do – they’d had their fill of picky, loud, taking up space forever and insisting on separate checks all day.

Unable to let it go, the group of teachers stalked the bar and plagued an overworked bartender until she was forced to drop everything and summon the owner. The owner, incidentally, is not known for his charming personality.

Words were exchanged as Ms.Richards appeared bent on schooling the owner in how to train his wait staff. He went off and told the women to “get out” and that he didn’t want any more teachers coming into his place. Period.

And so they left and one would think that aside from the wonderfully gossipy story this made for the rest of the afternoon – because teachers love to tell tales – that the matter was at an end.

But that would have only happened if Richards didn’t have email and a public school mailing list at her disposal.

The email, which is contained in the link above, called for teachers and those who love and support them to boycott not just the outlet where she was so poorly treated but all the affiliated eateries.

Because of a hair and a frazzled waitress multiple places of business should be avoided in the hopes of ….what? Putting them out of business? According to a response by someone with more people savvy than the Legend’s owner, about 500 people are employed between all the outlets. This doesn’t include those businesses that contract with the restaurants like my BFF’s husband.

So, let’s shit on hundreds of people because one woman has some sort of issue that involved a tremendous need for her hurt, embarrassed feelings to be publicly validated.

Good move.

And of course, because it’s Facebook and – unfortunately – teachers (who can be like lemmings – follow first/think for yourself later) thousands of people joined the Facebook group. Thousands.

I expressed dismay about the group on my FB page and a teacher friend who joined the group disagreed with my assessment. She saw it as discrimination and a civil rights issue as though teachers were some sort of socially cast aside minority which, as I recall, isn’t true. It’s not like teachers in the U.S. are being forced to wear gold stars or are shunted off to “separate but equal” sections of theatres or public transit. We are reviled for our privileged employment status and perks but we aren’t being targeted for any sort of final solution.

As we were discussing Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras in yoga training Sunday evening, the topic of how to deal with “mean” people came up. I noted that the younger the respondent, the more likely “standing up for yourself” was the answer.

I was like that for a long time, and I won’t pretend that people and things don’t sometimes still get my back up, but as Pantanjali points out – and I concur – we have no control over anything but our own reactions and responses. Additionally, our perception of any event is coloured by our own personal stories and may not reflect at all what the event or other person is about in the least.

The harried waitress may well have been inclined to apologize once she was able to step back from a table of eight women passing judgement on her but Richards’ inability to not take the hair and the initial response personally may have made it too difficult. Who wants to be bullied into apologizing for something that wasn’t her fault? Or gloated over for that matter?

Not me and I am guessing not you or Marsha Richards. It’s just human nature.

In the end, all we can do is step back, breathe and walk away when life, and the people who populate it, are caught up in dramas that threaten our own karma. Karma has nothing to do with payback, positive or negative. It is an entirely individual thing that one must mind and guard for one’s own sake.

Oh, and I didn’t join the FB group.

The Cutesy FaceBook Breast Cancer Awareness Meme


Last week at some point I noticed that my female FB friends were posting colors as their status updates.

Blue. Black. Pink.

I saw only single colors. None of the “orange with lacey trim” updates. If I’d seen the latter, I would have realized what they were talking about despite the fact that I have donned undergarments only a handful of times in the last two years.

Puzzled and on the verge of finding it really annoying, I posted a query in my own status update bar and received several private messages informing me that it was a trick that we women were playing on the men.

Psst … post your bra color and they won’t know what we are on about … tee hee hee. Pass it on.

Only one of the messages I received informed me of the “raising awareness for breast cancer” aspect of the meme. Just one. So much for raising awareness because I think quite a few women playing along had no idea why they were supposed to be doing this. They thought it was a neat in-joke on the men who followed their feeds because as anyone who ever played the game “telephone” knows, passed along messages drop parts of or garble context as they travel.

Once I knew the purpose, I spent a whole 5 seconds contemplating it before going back to updating about me. I had no bra color to update, that’s true, but I am not kindly disposed towards awareness campaigns that are never ending, as breast cancer is, and I still have issues with the whole “raising awareness” for certain diseases and not others.

For example, my late husband died because of a genetic metabolic disorder. There are about a half dozen metabolic disorders and nearly all of them are life-limiting in gruesome, family destroying ways. They are rare. Which is their bad. And no famous people have been afflicted by them that I am aware of, which means no one can start a campaign that will touch the hearts of the masses. No fun little “remember the genetically afflicted” FB meme’s for the victims of metabolic syndromes, alas.

I have noticed, perhaps you have to, that diseases afflicting the famous in some way are the ones that most people hear the most about. Or diseases that are noticeable and inflict hardship. On men. Losing breasts is hard to cover up, so to speak and it strikes at the “heart” of how women are judged on the attractiveness/desirability scale – by men. If women were being afflicted with a cancer no one could see, or that wasn’t connected to men’s sexual needs in some way that doesn’t make them squeamish, we wouldn’t hear a thing about it. It wouldn’t matter. Breasts matter to men. So breast cancer is a big deal. Cervical cancer and ovarian cancer are inside and icky, and men don’t want to know about anything below the navel save that there is a hole they can stick themselves in, ergo no walks, ribbons or year round assaulting awareness campaigns for cancers of the naughty bits or plumbing.

Rob’s late wife had melanoma. Do you know what color the ribbon is? Black. Nothing frou-frou or girly or uplifting about that color or even the tiniest bit hopeful for melanoma victims. Do you hear much about melanoma except for the yearly half-assed media censure against tanning salons that usually come out around the time that little high school girls are getting ready for spring prom?

No. You don’t.

Heart disease actually kills the most women every year while we are being encouraged to believe that very moderate exercise is okay and that fat should be a beauty standard.

Lung cancer is slowly moving up on the killer of women scale. Did you know that either?  Probably not. Lungs, unfortunately for them, are hidden underneath the most important of female assets and therefore, don’t count.

Someone on my FB friend’s list was upset by the “backlash” against the campaign. She thought we were heartless people not fit to be good friends and play along because you never know who might someday be stricken. That’s her opinion. I can see why she might feel that way. I offered my experience with the meme and was basically told to “fuck off” by some of her friends, and so I did. In the yoga sutras, Patanjali advises use of the fourth key in some instances and this was one of them. But pretending that something was a good idea or properly executed when it clearly wasn’t is not the way to go about promoting anything but discord and does more to turn people away from awareness efforts than not.

I didn’t post my lack of bra status. It was dumb regardless of the true reason though probably not as dumb as Farmville.

Coy outreach programs = advertising fails, but that’s just my opinion, as always.