Friends and the Internet

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I have a lot of friends that I know from the Internet. Some I’ve met IRL (in real life) and some I just know in an abstract way from Twitter, Facebook, and forums that I’ve been involved in. My Internet friends are a source of entertainment and amusement to me. I’ve spent many hours chatting away with people I will probably never meet, people who live all over the world, and yet whom I know a lot about.

In my travels I have met some of my Internet friends in person, and interestingly, I’ve found them to be pretty much the same as they are online. I wonder if the idea that people can be anything or anyone they choose online might be a bit of a myth. It seems to me that, given the chance to be anyone they want, most people end up just being themselves

And Internet friendship, just like any other relationships, are complicated. In many ways, some of my online friends know me better than those who live around me. Online, the space between me and them creates a distance that can be both a positive and a negative thing. For sure, there is a disconnection online that comes from a lack of physical proximity, but that lack of face-to-face, eye-to-eye has also meant that sometimes I have shared thoughts and feelings that I might not otherwise. It’s an interesting dynamic.

The thing about Internet friendships that surprises me the most is how easy it is to disengage with someone online. Decided you don’t like someone anymore? No problem. A few mouse-clicks later you never need to see or hear them again. I’ve done this myself to others, and others have done it to me. Sometimes it’s as hard emotionally as breaking up with a RL friend, and other times it really is just as simple as ‘you’re annoying me, goodbye’. Sometimes it makes me sad that it’s so easy.

But mostly I like the duality of my online-offline life. With the growing popularity of Facebook and Twitter, the boundaries of these are becoming more and more blurry. It used to be that I had online friends, and offline RL friends who were different sets of people. And now…you reading this might well be both!

I love hotels

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There is some profoundly luxurious about the crisp white sheets, the fluffy white towels, movies on demand, room service. To me, the money I spend on a good hotel when traveling is totally worth it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve stayed in my share of bad hotels. Baaad hotels. One in Inglewood, CA, I chose not to leave unless it was in a taxi – I was a bit scared of my less-than-salubrious neighbours hanging around on the street outside. So now I stay at the Marriott when visiting LA.
Sometimes it can be fun to stay in low-cost places. Staying at backpacker hostels is fun. You can meet interesting people and they tend to have better cooking facilities and free Internet.
But in general, I’m over sharing bathrooms and small dank rooms. Part of the pleasure of traveling for me is the sense of anticipation I feel sliding the keycard in the door, eager to see what’s behind it. After a long day of adventuring there is nothing better than kicking my shoes off and collapsing on a huge comfy bed.
And for a day or two I get to live another kind of life in that room, where I have a maid and cook on call and I never have to do the dishes. It’s the best, and I’m experiencing it right now. Bliss.

Comings and goings

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My Meagle moved out a couple of weeks ago. It’s been a long time coming. When we moved into our place last June, we did so with the assumption that Ms Meagle would be moving out sometime during the next year. Even though it was expected and right, it was still a teensy bit sad to say goodbye to my youngest child.

Luckily I didn’t have to dwell on my empty nest for long. Over dinner that night Stephen and I discussed what we would do with our new spare room. A chillout room perhaps? A reading room? A computer room? Most likely a sport equipment room. We finished dinner (at Tulsi) and on our way to dancing I called Antony to check in with how he was doing. Five minutes later our spare room had become Antony and Grace’s new bedroom.

They were in the process of finding a new place – bigger and nicer for when the new baby comes. They had given notice at their current place but had not found anywhere to move to. So that weekend, three days after my baby moved out, my boy, his girl and their baby moved in. It was an easy transition for Wyatt to make – he has his own room at our place (and his own Nana-Poppa-Wyatt routines which somewhat surprise his parents).

It’s lovely having them there. It’s nice to come home to a full and bustling house. It’s cosy. I love spending more time with my son, getting to know Grace better, and having time with my favourite bubba. And it’s great for Bronwen to get to know her new big brother and sister-in-law better. It’s funny, Bronwen and Wyatt are more like sister and brother than auntie and nephew. They already spend quite a lot of time together – Wyatt follows Bronwen around like a puppy, he just adores her.

And now they have found a lovely new home and will move out in a couple of weeks. Empty nest syndrome is sneaking up behind me again. I’m just lucky that I have Ms Bronwen to keep it at bay for a wee while longer.

Where everybody knows your name

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One of the things I missed the most when I was travelling overseas was the sense of connection that I felt to my place and its people. The longer I was away from home, the more dislocated I felt. I wasn’t doing the usual OE and so didn’t go somewhere like London and simply make a new place. Instead I was travelling around a lot. Always a new city, new landmarks, new people.

Eventually I landed in Temecula, California and stayed put for three months. Because I had been yearning for familiarity, I made connections quickly. I got to know all the checkout ladies at the local supermarket, the bus driver knew me by name. The coffeemakers at Starbucks missed me if they didn’t see me every day. Even the maintenance  guy at the apartment complex would stop and chat with me most days.

I was reminded of this feeling of dislocation (and the contrasting sense of home) last night at dinner, and again this morning.

Last night Stephen and I went to Tulsi for dinner. We haven’t been there for ages, but we used to go all the time. We wandered in and the Maitre d’ greeted us warmly. He gave us a cosy booth and turned the heater on for me. Then he asked if I’d like my usual…”chicken tikka and a plain naan?”. It was so lovely to be remembered. When I paid the bill, he asked if we had moved out of town, and I had to break the news that no, we had in fact been visiting other establishments. Awkward moment.

This morning, I popped in to C1 for a morning tea muffin. Obviously I’ve done this more times than I am aware of, because the woman behind the counter greeted me with, “Hi, vegan muffin to go?”. It felt good to be familiar.

The Cult of Mac

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My first encounter with an Apple computer was in the early 1980s when a friend of my mother’s came to visit from Canada and brought a Apple IIe with him. It was an amazing object to me. It seemed magical. And cool. I was nine. And my first impression of Apple products has been a lasting one.

It being the 1970s and then the 1980s, I didn’t have much of a chance to play with computers again for a while (except for a brief dalliance with a Commodore 64).

The next time I got my hands on a Mac was when I started university in 1995. It was a heady time for computing and for me. The internet was a new and amazing thing. I had my first encounter with Netscape. And I bought my first Mac from my brother for $1500. It was a Mac Classic, all-in-one unit with a 9″ monochrome screen. It had 4 megabytes of RAM, and a 40 megabyte hard drive. Needless to say, I loved it.

Mac Classic 1990-1993

It couldn’t run an internet browser, but it would connect to a 14k modem, so I could use it check this amazing new thing called electronic-mail. Very slowly. It was my constant companion through my undergrad years.

My next computer was a Power Mac 6100/66. It was a soulless beast. It had none of the charm of my beloved Classic. But the 6100 was a workhorse. Just what I needed to get me through my Honours and Masters years at uni. And it ran an internet browser, opening up the world for me and my children.

Power Mac 6100/66

Against everyone’s advice (“Apple is on it’s way out, they are obsolete/too expensive, there’s no software for them, yaddayadda”) I purchased my first new Mac in 2001. It was an iBook G3 laptop. Now this thing was a TANK. I once dropped it down a flight of concrete stairs (gasp, clunk, gasp, clunk, gasp etc.) and it lived to tell the tale – with not a scratch on it. It was beautiful clear white inside and out, with a blue bumper around the outside. It had an internal modem, a CD drive, and a cute handle so I could carry it like a handbag. The love affair was firmly established.

iBook G3 – Clamshell

And as they say, once you go laptop, you never go back. My next upgrade was a little white iBook (Daisy), then a MacBook (Meagle), then a MacBookAir – my current computer. I’ve also owned a version of every kind of iPod – the original brick, mini, nano, shuffle, photo, video, touch, and now my most beloved iPhone.

Why do I love them so much? It’s lots of things. They just seem to fit – they aren’t hard to figure out, they look beautiful, and all the bits work seamlessly together. They have a hard-to-explain X-factor that draws me to them. I’ve heard it before and I agree:

“For some, Apple is not just a product, it’s a way of life”.

My feet are firmly planted in the Cult of Mac. So much so in fact, that my first tattoo includes a (subtly drawn) Apple logo. If I didn’t point it out, you probably wouldn’t even notice it’s there.

You might call it crazy, I just call it devoted.

My Apple tattoo, cleverly hidden in the spots on a ladybug’s back

What do you do…?

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People ask each other this all the time. “So, what do you do?” Of course, what they mean to say is “how do you waste your time in that 8-10 hours of daylight each day?”

I never know the etiquette of asking this question. I am terminally nosy about other people’s lives, and I always want to know these kinds of details about them. In my perfect world, what-do-you-do-for-living? would be closely followed by “how do you spend your other time? What are your hobbies? What are your passions? What kind of family are you from? Where did you grow up? Do you have kids? Do you want kids? Where did you go to school? What are you doing after this? What about after that?”. Honestly, if I wasn’t being polite, I could be relentless. Once I decide I like someone, I want to know all about them. People and their lives and their choices fascinate me.

But, anyway, back to the point. At hockey on Monday, we got to the “what do you do” conversation in the locker room before the game. Some people were definitely more forthcoming than others.

Why is this? Are you reluctant to share what you do with others? Is it a status thing? i.e. you don’t want to position yourself as being of either higher or lower status than others in the conversation. That was my assumption.

For me, the only reluctance is around explaining what I do. When I taught sociology and anthropology at the University of Canterbury, explaining my job was straightforward (see how easy that was?). Everyone understands the concept of a university lecturer, even if they might be a bit hazy on the sociology/anthropology bit. So it would be a conversation starter: “Oh, what does a sociologist do?”

Now, I am an educational designer and project manager. They are vague, hard to explain terms. They don’t really sound like a proper job. Telling people what I do nowadays is often a conversation stopper. People don’t really know what to make of “educational designer” and I have trouble explaining it. Usually I resort to “I write training manuals for polytechs and other places like that”. But that’s not really what I do. A big part of my job is actually managing my own and other people’s work processes. It’s what I really love doing. I spend a lot of my day tracking work coming into my company from clients, recording it, allocating the work to an educational designer, editor or graphic designer, and then sending a beautiful product back of to the client for them to wow over.

I need to develop a slick patter for when people ask me the job question. The starting point for me? I love my job. Did I mention that? I really do.

Check us out if you like: SYNAPSYS

Birthdays and such

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Stephen, Bronwen and I went to Auckland over Queen’s birthday weekend to help my niece Esther celebrate her first birthday. Esther and her older sister Iris (who is just about to turn 3) are lovely girls and I am really enjoying watching them grow up, albeit mostly from a distance.

Iris is a feisty wee thing and likes to try her parents’ patience. Favourite activities include squealing at the top of her lungs, fully undressing as often as possible, stealing food (poor Bronwen coped this one) and the odd bit of biting. But beyond the less desirable personality characteristics, Iris is a charming and engaging little girl. She talks heaps and knows a lot about the world around her. She is confident and cheerful and happy to go with the flow. Esther is very different from Iris. She is a very placid kid. While we were there, she seemed content to putter around the house behind the Iris-Bronwen-Tornado, happily playing. She’s very cute and cuddly – I was reminded how nice it is to have a small child crawl into your lap, and hold on for a snuggle.

The Frompson-Thompsons: Fleur, Esther, Gerard, Iris, Bella the Dalmatian, Bebe, Bronwen, Stephen

The other fun and interesting aspect of this visit is that I was able to meet up with my sister Gillian, whom I have not seen since my own children were babies. Gillian has been in Japan for most of the 15-odd years since I last saw her. That, plus the fact that she’s always been a bit reclusive and not well-inclined towards me has meant that even when we have been in the same city and country, we haven’t caught up. It was nice to chat. Gillian and Iris have a special bond that only they understand (my sister never expressed any interest in children in any way). It is very endearing.

I find that the older I get, the more I appreciate that my family is an important part of my life. When I left home at the tender age of 16, babe under my arm, I decided that I would make a family of my own – I felt disillusioned by my family of origin. I stayed that way all through my twenties and thirties. And now, almost in my forties, I am gaining a new appreciation of that strange assorted bunch of people I call my kin. I might even call it fondness, but let’s not go crazy.

Esther and Bebe and Gillian

I’ve been thinking

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Well I’m back, blogosphere! I took a couple of weeks off blogging after the 30-day challenge. This was partly because I needed to wait until I had something to say, and partly because I’ve been so damn busy. What have I been up to, I hear you ask.

My weeks are full: Mondays is my ice hockey game, Tuesday is ballroom dancing class, Wednesday is futsal, Thursday is my regular meeting, Friday is a rest day (wahoo!), Saturday is skate school, and Sunday is ice hockey practice.

Phew, I’m exhausted just looking at the list. Add to this work, running, gym, spending time with Stephen, Bronwen, Wyatt, Megan, trying to catch up with other family and friends, running a household and you can see that I have a very full life! Sometimes I just can’t do all these things and have to have a day off here and there, but in general I love my life. I love the busy-ness of it all.

On another note, my father’s wife Lorraine died on Thursday night. She had a massive heart attack and dropped dead on the bathroom floor. My father found her two hours later, and spent half an hour doing CPR waiting for the ambulance to arrive. It breaks my heart to think of how he must have felt in that 30 minutes.

My father and I are not super close, but I feel so sad for him. They were together for 10 years, and in that time he has been the happiest I’ve ever seen him. In their mid-60s, they had both just started winding down their working lives, and had big plans for traveling around in a van my father had fitted out for this purpose. I worry what will happen next.

This is going to sounds hugely cliched, but it reminds me once again to live life to the full. I don’t ever want to put my dreams on hold, thinking I have plenty of time.

That thing you’ve been thinking about getting on to that thing that will make you feel good, or make someone else smile, go and do it now!

Day 30 — Whatever tickles my fancy

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Last one for the 30-day challenge!

To be honest, I’ve found the 30-challenge quite a challenge. I have a very busy life, and don’t always relish starting or finishing my day with a story about this or that. So, what tickles my fancy right now?

This does:

Steve Jobs and the iPad

Stephen and I are both waiting with anticipation to get one of these wee beauties. They are released in New Zealand in July, and I’m thinking we’ll be first in line!

Why do we want one? Because we can. We don’t NEED it, but look at it, it’s so COOL! Is it a laptop? No, not quite. Is it a PDA? No, it’s so much more than that. It is the perfect fit between our home computers (Mac Mini and a MacBook Air) and our iPhones.

And finally, this is what REALLY tickles my fancy. The man I share my life, my hopes, my dreams, my home, my family, my everything with. I love you Stephen

more than my iPhone even.

Day 29 — My hopes, dreams and plans for the next 365 days

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Again, let’s go with the highlights, grouped into different areas of my life:

Family hopes/dreams/plans

  • Well, number one has to be getting married. I’ve been married before, but it seems like another lifetime ago to me now. I really feel like I am embarking on the adventure of married life for the first time. First time round, I didn’t really understand the significance of what I was doing. I do now. I have truly met the man of my dreams and I want to spend all my days with him. Even the ones where he won’t STOP TALKING and leaves his socks and shoes laying around for me to trip over.
  • I am so looking forward to becoming a Frayle. The Frayle’s are a cool bunch of people (you know who you are) and I am so happy to have a new big and bustling family around me. I have to break the bad news though, I will be a Frayle in my heart, but not name. After we get married I want to keep my name Thompson. There is a long and complicated reason for this  – but I can explain that another time.
  • I look forward to the birth of my next grandchild, due in September. I’ve loved being a Nana, and although I imagine that two of ’em will be a challenge, it’s a challenge I meet with relish.
  • I am looking forward to watching Wyatt grow and develop. His little personality is starting to come out and I kinda like it. He’s a strange one.
  • I look forward to watching Bronwen grow and develop. She has changed a lot in the year I’ve known her – become more responsible and a great little team player in the Frompson household. It has been a big change/challenge for her and I’m proud at how she’s stepped up.
  • My little Meagle is planning on moving out of home sometime this year, so I have hopes and dreams and plans for our new extra space.

Sporting hopes/dreams/plans

  • I am looking forward to finishing a season of hockey in the women’s league and then signing up for the social B grade next season, having a season already under my belt. If I fall over less often than Paul did last year, I’ll feel pretty good about myself.
  • I’d really like to score a goal in Futsal. I think I’ll work on my ‘being able to kick the ball instead of squealing at it’ skills for now.

Work hopes/dreams/plans

  • I am looking forward to developing my project management skills, and growing into the role of educational designer.

Random other hopes/dreams/plans

  • I plan to be the proud part-owner of an iPad in the not-to-distant-future.
  • I am looking forward to getting an iPhone 3GS later this year.
  • I am looking forward to going to Lake Tekapo in the wintertime and skating on the outdoor rink there.

There are so many other small things bubbling away that fill my time and attention, I couldn’t begin to list them all. Suffice to say, I am planning on having a great year. I know it’s not all going to be roses. Life will always throw me curve balls,  but I know that the hard times are what make the good times so good!