Tag: friends

Blogging

Some days writing posts for a daily blog is a grind. The post you’ve scheduled for publication doesn’t feel quite right, but you don’t have anything else ready so you publish it anyway, or worse yet there’s nothing in your queue and you find yourself scrounging for something, anything, to publish. 

Hey, here’s an amusing picture of a pregnant pig practicing Lamaze. It’ll do! 

But some days are just fun. Like today. I found several gems written by bloggers I follow. Some I reblogged and others I shared on Facebook or Twitter. My own scheduled post turned out well, and I even composed a quick on the spot piece when a flash of inspiration struck during lunch. Yes, I should have scheduled it for a future publication date, but sometimes a writer just needs instant feedback. I’ll worry about tomorrow, tomorrow. 

I also fiddled with a draft of a short story that’s been in the works for awhile. Hopefully one day soon the characters will let me know what they plan to do next. Right now I’m having difficulty getting out of a fictional whorehouse. Don’t judge. It’s complicated.

Maybe the best part of a fun blogging day is the feedback, the comments, and smiley faces. Interacting with fellow bloggers whether about my own writing or theirs is often the bright spot in my day. I have some insanely witty commenters. Don’t even read my blog posts, just read the comments section. Wait, I didn’t mean that. Shhhh!!!
So, if you’re a blogger does this all sound familiar? If you tell me every day is a piece of cake I might just paste a frownie face in your comments section.

Peace, people!

A semi-irrelevant picture of my sELFie and me.

Social Media Storm

In the wake of the horrible terrorist attack in France social media sites are in an uproar. Anger, fear, and hatred fuel the conversations. 

In the midst of a heated debate with someone I don’t even know we both paused. I said something about political arguments not ever changing minds, and I offered a virtual handshake and a hug.

He agreed and posted this:

  Maybe we all need to take a deep breath, and stop second guessing every action from the right and the left. Stop demonizing our leaders and those who seek to lead. 

None of us can grasp the whole picture, yet each of us has an opinion based on the tiny piece we do see. That’s never very productive or helpful.

So I’m stepping up, opening my arms wide, and embracing everyone. Now, don’t crowd in too close, there’s room for everyone. There, there. You, the good looking one, over here….

Seriously, peace, people.

  

Friends I Don’t Know

Thanks to social media and WordPress I’ve become friends with a large number of people who* I’ve never actually met face to face.  (*Should that be whom? I’m sure one of my friends will let me know.)

I enjoy these friendships formed over creative writing, political leanings, and witty comments. In many ways they are as important to me as friendships formed in old-fashioned ways, such as over a shared love of hopscotch in elementary school or while playing hooky together in junior high (not that I ever did that, of course). 

Social media friends tend to be extremely forthright and plain-spoken. If one thinks you’re full of cow manure or a post is weak they’re likely to tell you, knowing they’ll never have to look you in the eye. If a fellow blogger doesn’t “like” or comment on a post their silence might indicate that they didn’t care for the piece or that they didn’t have time to actually read it. The Pollyanna in me always believes it to be the latter.

A friend I don’t know with whom I play Words With Friends (Roy S.) went missing from the game for more than a week, and I began to worry about him. Because the game is our only link, I had no way to inquire after him. Finally this week he played a word and in chat said he’d been unwell for the past few days. Whew! Of course I’d imagined poor Roy S. dangling from a cliff by one hand while trying frantically to type “a-p-r-a-x-i-a” with the other.

Similarly, if I don’t hear or read something from a blogger I follow I start feeling anxious. My imagination goes on overdrive and trust me, in my mind some of you have met spectacular ends. I’m so very relieved when I see a post from your site, and your make-believe death gets saved in my future fiction file.

This leads to the following question: Shouldn’t there be a way of making sure the friends we don’t know are ok? Maybe I’ll invent an app that generates one final note on social media upon one’s death. Something like:

Hey there. Leslie’s dead. She wanted you to know that your support meant so much. Here’s one last poem composed in advance of her demise to be shared on this occasion.

Gone

By Leslie aka Nana 

Life was so wonderful

But my time has come,

No one thought I was sick

Guess they feel pretty dumb.

But I lived a full life

Full of all that is good,

Now sit and weep for me

Like any real friend would.

Leslie knew this wasn’t much of a poem, but, hey she was really sick.

Peace, and good health, people!

  

Remember When

  

remember when youth
defined our relationships?
who kissed whom, when, why?

remember when life
seemed suspended in bubbles
of the possible?

remember when love
was everywhere, yet nowhere
for all, even you?

remember when fate
was always to be tempted?
damn consequences!

remember sweetest
softly tangled memories,
joy amid regrets.

remember classmates
underneath crinkles remain
life’s anchors, steadfast.

Hangover Haiku

head throbs, stomach roils
nausea threatens to rise;
drunken aftermath.

 
unwelcome symptoms,
consequences of
over indulging.

 
should know better now
in fifth decade’s last hurrah
I learned too slowly.

 

Peace, people! 

I might’ve had way too much to drink at my high school reunion this weekend. 

Making Friends

I might’ve found a friend today in the handbag department at Dillard’s. She moved to Tallahassee a year to the day before I did. If that’s not the basis for a good friendship I don’t know what is.

 

We bonded over this Frye bag. Good heavens the woman has good taste!
 
Peace, people.

Reunions

I attended two high schools back in the 70’s: Floydada high school and Dumas high school. Just three hours apart in travel time, but at that point in my life it might as well have been three hundred hours. 

I’d spent all of my school life in Floydada, Texas, population 4,000, until the end of my junior year in high school when my dad switched jobs necessitating a move to Dumas, Texas, population 10,000-ish. Eventually I adjusted to life in the “big city” of Dumas. It was tough, but I made friends and met my Studly there, and graduated from Dumas high school in 1975,  so all’s well that ends well, right?

Fast forward to 2015 and the epic forty year class reunion. I would love to attend the reunion in Dumas, and I’m even going to be in Texas the weekend it takes place. Unfortunately that’s the same weekend the the Doright Family Reunion is scheduled, and I’ll be unable to be in two places at once. 

Floydada’s class of ’75 is planning to meet in Gruene, TX, in October. I’ve already booked my hotel room for that event. After all, these are the grown-up versions of kids I went to school with from kindergarten through my junior year.

I was never “most beautiful” or “most popular,” but I always had a place among my class. And I was probably too busy dealing with my own insecurities to notice those who were more disenfranchised than I was. So I was caught by surprise when a member of the class became angry that she’d been invited to the reunion because she had felt disrespected and unnoticed during our school years.

I wish I’d noticed her more. I wish I’d been nicer, friendlier, more inclusive. I wish I’d known then what I know now–that it doesn’t diminish our own worth when we include others. Who knows how my life might’ve turned out if I’d known that years ago?

To all those who felt they weren’t included, you are loved and valued and I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you this years ago.

Peace, people!

Just Bummed Out

when life seems unfair
and no deed goes unpunished
don’t despair, just breathe.

 
bummed out again, friend?
discard all of those worries
just throw them away.

  

tell me your troubles
then leave them far behind you.
don’t wallow; just live.

 

Lingering Over Wine With Friends

We linger for hours
over bottles of fine wines;
no need to hurry.

  
These perfect moments
captured in warm memories
even as we drink.

  
Friends enhance the grape
even mediocre wines
seem superb vintage.

Written in response to the Daily Post’s Daily Prompt: Linger–tell us about times In which you linger, when you don’t want a day or an event to end.

Reading Doldrums

 Circling in the waves,

Caught up in an

Eddy,

Reeling from
the done,

The finished,

The read. 

Now what? 

Am I supposed
to forget 

Those I grew to love,

to fear, 

to hate? 

Where do they go 

When I turn the

Final page,

When we part ways?

I finished book two in a three-part series yesterday. Rushing to shop in my Kindle bookstore I was dismayed to discover that book three won’t be available until March. Of 2016. I’d cry if I thought it would do me any good.

The point is, I broke my Cardinal rule of reading: Thou shalt not begin a book series until at least three books are available to purchase.

Three is a great number because many series end there. If I waited until every book in a series had been written and made available to the reading public I might not ever have gotten to read the Game of Thrones series.  As it is I’ll probably die before knowing what happens to John Snow, et. al.

Thank heaven for Facebook, though. After posting a plea for good book suggestions my feed was pleasantly inundated with not just good, but great recommendations, including that of a novel, The Adventure of the Yrsa written by a friend under the pseudonym, Lillian Sullivan.  

My cup runneth over!

Peace, People.