FACEBOOK AND ME

Other than the odd nattering, most of the time I am ‘on’ Facebook, it is ‘remote’ because I will find something on another site and post it to my page.  Should I have my mail open (and I am not listening to either music or the news!), I will reply to an alert or two, showing that someone has left a comment on my rambling.

A while back I posted a link to a NC-17 site and got several complaints and a few de-friendings.  Though deep down I was ‘like, whatever’, it did get me to thinking about whether or not my ‘indelicate crowd yelling’ bothered people and why did it?

Now I do think that if someone has a problem with something that I do, post anywhere, or say out of my mouth, they are free to their opinion.  It will be noted and handled by the same committee that is in charge of things like ‘the evidence of the shooter in the grassy knoll’ and ‘where the lost ark of the covenant’ was stored at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie!  I can’t say it doesn’t matter to me, otherwise I would not write about it.  But what ‘gets’ me about my updates on Facebook is when I post something that I think is worthy of notice and it gets no attention!  Again, not that I am looking for ‘likes’ and comments, but unlike what happens in my journal (and I am fine attracting the audience that I draw and the comments that are left here), it just makes me go ‘Hmm’ at what caught some folks attention and what doesn’t.

My roomie from Greensboro saw a 'Scrubs' photo I posted and mistook Donald Faison for one of the cats in our circle from A&T.  He ended up becoming a working actor, not necessarily famous or well known, but he works and has a career in Hollywood.  It made me think about why I think that I am going to catch the tail of a shooting star and ride off into unexplored galaxies is that I was welcomed in the company of people who would go on to attain material success and live spiritually fulfilling lives.  People who I know are sincere, and have been able to look and see the kind of character that is in me and would call me ‘friend’.

Anywho, I would post some clips of a cat who I worked with for several boxing matches.  He was a TOP SHELF cat and I remember coming home after one of his big fights and Tee Jay kind of looking at me like, “Really… THAT’S who you get in and out of the ring with every day when you are away?”  He had beat the puddin’ out of this one cat and all I could tell her was, “Well, he didn’t do that to me”, but that might have been because he didn’t have to, either!  Still, I used to work out with some bad, bad, men.  If I saw me walking down the street and I knew that I was capable of what I know I am capable of with my fists, I wouldn’t bother me!!

THE ESTEEM-CONFIDENCE LOOP

It is really a chicken-or-the-egg kind of question… is it more important to have someone build up your self-esteem or do you need to have an accomplishment for your self-confidence to break out?  What I am a firm believer in is that when you lack in one, the other suffers and to not have either generally leads to fail.  Ideally, you would have sufficient portions of both and you would go on skipping into the sunset, clear-eyed, happy, with a full heart!  Life though, has other plans than for us to live by the ‘best case scenario’ and there is generally an ebb and flow for most of us.  That’s fine too, but what isn’t fine is when the circulatory system gets all gummed up and stops functioning.  People who are in this condition are confusing, because their actions aren’t synched up with their desires.  You see this behavior a lot in relationships.

In the two crap-tastic best sellers by Terry McMillian, ‘Waiting To Exhale’ and ‘How Stella Got Her Groove Back’, you had women of all ages crying, ‘Amen’ to the travails of the women in the former and celebrating victory in the latter novel.  Not gonna go ‘there’ ( and ‘there’ is the authoress actual life, which bore a resemblance, IMO, to both stories) but I will say if the SMC and ‘Sisterhood of Why Can’t I Find A Man’ had read with the same interest and enthusiasm as her SECOND novel, ‘Disappearing Acts’, perhaps there would not have been such a change in relationships between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

The characters in the two big blockbusters were all shallow caricatures of who women THOUGHT they were like, WISHED they were like, but WASN’T.  I think that the exercise of fantasy that both ‘…Exhale’ and ‘…Stella’ engaged in was pulpish, almost like they were tabloid novels.  In ‘Disappearing Acts’, I thought there was the very real situation of a accomplished, successful young sister who rather than be disillusioned by the paucity of brothers in her social circle, gave a cat who while he was into manual labor, had flashes of being something and seemed to be motivated enough to picture growing into something more.

AND IT WASN’T LIKE MOVIES

…because in movies, they work it out.  Things did not go as well as it could have for the couple in ‘…Acts’ and I thought hard about why that was.  ‘Franklin’, had in ‘Zora’ a woman who was more than willing to work with him and all the extraneous attachments that he came with.  She did not care that he did not earn the same kind of money as she did, nor was she overly concerned about his prospects as long as he had a goal, something to hope for and a future to build towards as couple, she was ready and willing.

You will have to read the book to find out why Franklin and too many cats like him are so disappointing.  Their story was further confirmation that the direction I had hoped to go in regarding relationships was the one that I should take.  Problem is, I never recognized my ‘Zora’ and the ones that I thought were ‘her’, weren’t.

I am still a little ‘undecided’ on if there is a ‘happily ever after’ for me and my love life.  Coming here, it was ‘…or bust’, but I am not so sure if it has to be that way for a brother, you know?  But that talk is a digression.

Moving to Omaha is not simply a fresh start for me.  It also is a metaphor that severs the connection that I had with my family and the ‘strain’ of attitudes that I could only find in the Motor.  Either they were flawed, in denial and therefore in a perpetual state of disarray (A.K.A, ex-Wife), or can’t imagine the world beyond 8 Mile Road.

Les Brown talked about people who nit-pic and create a drag on the designs of other people’s hopes… he called them ‘the dream busters’, and I had a family of them when it came to mine.  I could barley contain myself when the twins came back to the Motor and their subsequent public statements about ‘this and that’… it was too little and too late for all that.  Shee-oot, I compare their finding a way to cheer for another boxer who I HAD TO FIGHT as treasonous as rooting for the Taliban or cheering for  Notre Dame (we keed, we keed..!  Notre Dame is aii-right!)!

Oh… and my ex-wife… and I will lift off from there, later, my brother (or sister, if you are one!)