Change – it’s all very strange

A close friend of mine is an artist who enjoys reading deep esoteric material – dying, healing, the after-life, and also Krimis – Mankell, George, Leon, and a host of others. I’m more of Stieg Larsson kinda reader – Le Carre, but also Findley, Turner Hospital, Dahl, and a whole lot of people I’d never heard of until a few years ago: Gebbie, Hershman, O’Callaghan, Kennedy (Cate & Thomas E.), Kelly, Butler, O’Reilly, McNamara, Raynes, Jourdan, and so many others – all over the place, I guess.

My friend is a luddite who is slowly getting into the ether, but I can rarely get her on her mobile (she doesn’t answer when it rings); yet here and there, I will get an email “sent from my IPad”. I was one of the first women writers online in the pre-web days, had harangued TB-L for a project, and was convinced the web was for sharing. I was strongly into Facebook, left it, and came back with a vengeance. I was exploding. Burning out on social media. Indignez-Vous! Yeah!

I still have a low profile on Twitter and LinkyDing, where I post news about occasional blogposts, comments and interesting articles that fit in with the philosophy of Stephane Hessel.

Anyway, years ago, my dear friend, with another, spent a great deal of time working on my horrorscope, based on what she knew of our friendship – which went back … it must be over 45 years now – and what she knew about psychology, and all this, guided by her friend who was into astrology in a serious way.

Well, I can take all that stuff with a bucket of salt as I only listen to bits that fit in with what I’m doing – an optimist at heart, you see. Anyway, my chart said that in the latter part of my life, I would become introspective, a hermit of sorts. An oxymoron. But hey, what else is new? It’s hard for an extrovert to be a hermit and, like a dragon, recoil in her cave and pull at a loose tooth, or a fang. Puff!

The weird thing is that my first blog post for 2015 talked about change. Moving on. And there I was, all of a sudden, quitting FB. No plan. Just doing it. I didn’t want casualties. (That came in retrospect.) There were lots of people from my pre-web and pre-conference and former life days I had reconnected with. There were new friends that I didn’t want to lose as contacts. But all the hype about having to be “out there” was getting to me. It wasn’t my way of seeing things. I guess, that’s why this post.

I have a part-time job that I Iove, which will go on another 4 or 5 years. Hey, I’m having a poem published in that area. It may even be launched in Chicago this year at a big education conference. Today I heard that a weird thing I wrote in English will be included in a German-language anthology to be published by a well-respected publisher in Vienna this year. I must add that publishers of creative works here often can get grants from the local government to cover costs, so it’s not about sales.

It’s not about sales! And I think that’s my saving grace, if it can be called grace when an albatross muddles through the industry.

And then came Charlie. And there’s so much going on in my mind about the implications of that. But I shall wait on that note until things cool down. Should they? Can they? Will they? I was talking to one of our post-docs today. He works in a centre advising men on how to handle stuff like violence. He did his PhD on religious schooling in Austria. Islam. Catholicism. His defensio moved me, and I’m no expert in the field.

And around the same time, out of the blue, I think I may have come up with a structure in 5 acts for my opus. Well, after the fact, I discovered it was Will S’s, but hey.

I have so much to ponder.

So, for my friends on ex-FB, thanks for being there. Keep in touch. And a special thanks to BSB for saying he’d miss “mon indignation.”

As always, onwards!