Infant Son

When I lived back across town, I used to jog down a little country road to get to the park. At the bottom of the hill on this road was a small stream with a two lane bridge. I've always been a water nut, after having grown up on a farm with a small creek running through it, and am not able to pass over a stream without at least a casual glance to see if the water's clear, muddy, any fish, how deep, etc. I'd been running across this bridge for month's, maybe even a year and never noticed anything other than a narrow clear water stream running over some rocks and moss. This day the covering of trees aligned their branches just right and allowed a shaft of sunlight straight down on something as I passed, and it caught my eye. It appeared to be a partially covered license plate, nothing of terrible interest, although I did slow to see if I could make out the year. What I saw stopped me in my tracks.

INFANT

That's no license plate, I thought. Later that day I came back with some boots on to cut through the brush surrounding the creek on either side of the bridge. Dropping into the creek somewhat abruptly, I almost landed on the object. It was a stone. Cut stone, almost immediately recognizable as a head stone. I didn't really do anything for a while. I just stood there wondering how the hell a child's tombstone wound up in a creek bed. The bridge behind me had scary looking graffiti under it. Maybe this was some sick satanic thing, I thought. Maybe this was where the child was buried?! No, it couldn't ever have been anything but a creek bed. Someone had thrown this off the bridge, perhaps stolen as a prank, then discarded. I had to repatriate it. I began digging and soon found that the stone extended deeply into the creek bed. It took perhaps five minutes of digging to even get the stone loose enough to rock in its bed. Another couple of minutes to get it to move, slowly, sliding up out of the muck. The part of the stone that lay beneath the water and mud was blackish green with algae, but words could be made out.

INFANT
SON OF
MR. & MRS..
B. F.
GILLENTINE
1918

I felt a strong wave of sadness pass over me. A nameless infant. A son. Was he the only son? The only child? Did Mr. and Mrs. B. F. Gillentine still live, and if they did, did they lay at night, just before sleep, wondering what sort of son he would have made?

I cleaned up the stone that night and made some internet inquiries into the name. The closest I could ever come - and I thought I had hit it on the head - was a Benjamin Franklin Gillentine in far West, Texas, hundreds of miles from the Dallas area where I live. I got him on the phone, a very old man, somewhat gruff and either not comprehending what I was asking, or simply thinking I was trying to sell him something. In short, I gave up, and put the stone in my garage, where it's been for nearly ten years. Perhaps I'll restart the search for a relative, a grave, a cemetery. In the intervening years, the internet has burgeoned, and perhaps more genealogical information is there now to help me find a resting place for the stone.

1918 was the year of the Great Flu Epidemic. It swept through Texas as well as the rest of the world, killing the young and old alike. I found a guy through the local library who tracked all the headstones in all the cemeteries in Arlington, Texas, and he couldn't find the name. He said there was dozens if not hundreds of nameless infant graves from that year.




It's a sad thing to have lying around the house, and I feel a little like a vandal myself, just having it here, like the remnants of some bad Halloween prank. And it may in fact be just that.

I'll try again. This headstone belongs somewhere. My daughter suggested we just take it to one of the little country cemeteries around here, but that doesn't seem right, either, like taking a child to the park and leaving him there. I'd rather have the stone here.

Later

Waterman, Illinois, June 28th, 1878

My dad, a successful commercial designer of some note, decided he wanted to be a farmer when he hit 40.I don't think the term midlife crisis existed back then, but I'm sure this act of vocational insanity on his part qualified as such. I was about 6 years old, and saw our move from comfortable middle class suburban Batavia, Illinois to the little farm town of Waterman as an enormous adventure. The farm had been a steal, and we soon found out why. Situated on 140 acres, the farm house was so dilapidated that the previous owners had kept chickens in the living room, which was sectioned off from the rest of the house with chicken wire and plywood. Rat holes were covered with old license plates. The original deed on the farm had been signed with an indian tribe, the Shabonna Indians, in 1865. It was the oldest building I'd ever set foot in. Dad immediately started spending every free weekend moments dragging us kids out for "work weekends" trying to get the house habitable, which, to his credit, he eventually did, making something of a local landmark of the place. In the process, he tore into walls - ancient pre-sheetrock lat and plaster walls, and discovered what I considered to be some of the greatest wonders of my young life.
Once upon a time, when people still actually used razor blades, when they changed them, they would slip the old blade into a slot at the back of a recessed medicine cabinet. If you see an old medicine cabinet, look for this slot at the back. It's just the size of an old double edged razor blade. When dad tore into the bathroom wall, a torrent of ancient razor blades came pouring out. These were startling, but not much in the way of collectibles. This was not all that came out of the walls, however. Here's a list, as best I can remember:

1 - One woman's high button "greave" shoe, with perhaps a dozen buttons running up the side. Shrivelled from age, it was still impossibly small by modern standards, and yet black, clearly an adult woman's shoe.

2 - Corn cobs. This as a complete mystery to us. At first we thought that rats had taken the ears of corn into the walls, depositing the cobs. We later learned from an old neighbor that people used to put cobs in the walls as primitive insulation.

3- A letter (copy below) dated June 28th, 1978. This floored me as a child, like taking a time machine back to the time of Civil War. The edges had been nibbled off by rats, so many of the words are missing, but the general meaning comes through shining across the decades. A young woman is not going to a dance, and most certainly going nowhere with "Georgie". In fact, she's not even going to be at church on Sunday, but safely at home. Poor Georgie. Was this a letter sent and received, secreted in a wall, or written and never mailed.


Etta, I love you across time, feel your pain, think about you sitting at home at the farm house hating on Georgie, but probably really wishing you were at the dance. Thanks for sharing your house with me, a hundred years later.

Later.

Regarding bicycles, pedestrians, and what happens when the twain do meet.

Short blog post before I piss off anymore bicyclists on Twitter. This path I’m talking about is a long very nice concrete two lane job running something like 18 linear miles along the Trinity River in Arlington, Texas. It’s a “multi-use” path, and is clearly marked as such throughout. It is also clearly marked with signs as follows:

· Speed limit 20 mph.
· Announce “Passing on left” when passing
· Bicycles yield to pedestrians.

As you can see, the warnings are mostly pointed at cyclists. Not many of us run fast enough to pass anything other than turtles and snakes. I’m pretty sure the world record 100 meter dash is not much above 20 mph, so that’s pretty much for bikes, too.
Now, the real problem lies in this whole “multi-use” business. Because of this, you have a range of users from high end cyclists on 2 thousand dollar bikes and competition dress to mother’s walking their toddlers. Not a good recipe for sharing. Having said this, though, for right or wrong, the signs say cyclists yield to pedestrians. Not “when appropriate” or “when I feel like it”, but in all cases. Are there jerky inconsiderate (mostly just clueless) pedestrians? Sure. They just tend to be outnumbered by bicyclists bent on pushing the speed limit, riding two across (in your lane coming at you) and not announcing anything except “Look out!” at the pedestrians when they get in their way.

The cyclists need their own path. That’s the real solution. But unless and until, as long as there is no enforcement out there, it’s actually dangerous to be a pedestrian. The difference is this: a pedestrian is not going to cause a pedestrian collision. Bicylces can not only cause these with peds, but also with other cyclists. I’ve seen two cyclists bitch each other out for not minding lanes. This is a pretty serpentine path. Cyclists sometimes don’t anticipate what might be around the next bend. On foot, that’s not a problem. At 19.9 mph on a bike, it can literally be a life or death situation.

So, at any rate, here’s what happened today.

I am running in my lane headed eastward. A woman jogger with child in a jog stroller in front of her is about to pass me in the oncoming, opposite lane. At this moment, a cyclist at or near 20 mph approaches in my lane from behind me. I don’t hear him, but see the woman jogger’s eyes go huge. The cyclist yells something at her while, at speed, passing BETWEEN US, in both our lanes, yielding to neither of us, not announcing his pass, not touching his brakes. If I had stumbled and fallen to my left, it would have thrown him into her path, her child’s stroller, at a speed easily high enough to kill the child. I was freaking furious. He didn’t slow down at all, but actually had the gall to call some kind of admonishment back AT US for not making way for him! If I’d been a cop, that guy would never sit on a bicycle again.

I have a theory. I was actually a cyclist too, up until I started running about 9 years ago. You don’t go to school, read books, take classes and tests to become a bicylclist like we do when we learn to drive a car. So, our dad pushes us down the driveway, let’s go, and the whole rest of the body of our bicylcle instruction is self taught. Kids don’t know about stop signs, yield signs. Ever see a kid on a bike stop at a stop sign? And a lot of that is because this sort of loose self taught, non regulated method for learning doesn’t have anything to do with the rules of the road. Most of us were too busy jumping sidewalks, hedges, sprinklers, whatever, to avoid stop signs. So, there we are, 20, 30 years later, gear strapped on, climbing onto our 2 thousand dollar bikes, with the same attitudes we had riding the neighborhood as kids.

So, yes, pedestrians can be jerks on the park path, too. The difference is that they don’t have any where near as much potential to do great physical harm. And there are a great many very good cyclists whom I pass every day. We say Hi to each other and sometimes even stop to talk.

This is not about all bicyclists. Neither is it about pedestrians. It’s about rules and safety. It is about jerks, and they can be on foot, in cars, on bikes, in planes, everywhere.

Why I Hate Aphorisms

Well, I really don’t hate them. I mean, what’s to hate about “A conceited person never gets anywhere because he thinks he is already there.” Or “A winner never quits -- a quitter never wins.” An aphorism is defined by Webster as: 1 : a concise statement of a principle, or 2 : a terse formulation of a truth or sentiment. They’re the sort of thing that slowly puts a wry smile on your face, or evokes a knowing nod, or a wistful sigh. And I just hate them. They always hit me as trite, contrived, sappy, corny, any of a host of negative reactions, but that’s not really my beef with them. Here, then, is a list of things I find irritating about aphorisms:

1. They really aren’t very original. When was the last time you heard one that was truly unique? For me, about 30 years ago.

2. They’re usually just a reformulation of something that you already know. Sort of a “preaching to the choir” thing. When was the last time you really had your mind, life strategy, attitude changed by an aphorism? I mean REALLY changed?

3. They tend to be things that we don’t so much follow as simply find comforting, reassuring, calming. We feel better about ourselves not for acting in response to them but in sharing them with others, as if we are the wise old sages.

4. We tend to feel better about ourselves not by following the wisdom in them, but by SHARING the wisdom with others. I watched a 5 or 6 tweet long “dueling aphorisms” episode on Twitter a few weeks ago, one aphorism evoking an “Oh, that’s a good one! Here’s another one?” like the two tweeters were passing along old family recipes.

5. They are just saccharine. I have really only ever felt truly nailed in the forehead by about 2 aphorisms, and this was because they were truly unique, truly wise, and hit me at exactly the right moment.

6. They are too clever, too contrived.

7. They don’t represent how we actually communicate. I mean, did Kahlil Gibran really speak this way? Wife: “Kahlil, honey, what do you want for supper?” answer: ;” A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.”

8. They all tend to sound like your high school basketball coach. At least they sound like my high school basketball coach.

9. They can take the place of original thought, insight, experience, wisdom. On Twitter, at any rate, I would much rather hear what YOU have to say, and not Rumi. (Whoever he is.)

10. There’s an air of condescension, arrogance about them. If you really spoke like this to other people, you’d be branded as a tool. Even just repeating them for others implies that you are doling out wisdom from a place superior to others.

I would love to be at a dinner party where Kahlil Gibran, Winston Churchill, and M Scott Peck all happened to be at the same table. Can you imagine the aphorism showdown? It reminds me of the scene from “Tombstone” where the Doc Holiday character and the Johnny Ringo character start trading quips in Latin while others look on in awe. This may be how people write, but it’s not how they speak, at least not where I live. And even if it is how they write, they better be pretty damn wise to get away with it. I notice from looking at some of the famous aphorism websites that there seem to be certain criteria for doling out this wisdom:

· Being dead appears to give you a bully pulpit. Gives a sort of timeless wisdom aspect to them. Also protects us from copyright infringement.

· Being obscure lends an air of mystery and wisdom. If it weren’t for his aphorisms, most of us would probably think Kahlil Gibran was one of the convicted 9-11 terrorists.

· Being a world leader, religious icon, famous person is a distinct advantage. If you are nobody, you ought to be pretty damn wise before expecting to get quoted.

· Coming from another culture appears to give a boost. Adds to the air of mystery, I guess. There's a distinct bias towards Eastern knowledge, I find. From Persia to China. I often wonder how well these are even being translated.

· Coming from another era seems important. Most of these come from at least the last century.

But, really my problem with aphorisms is this: I suspect that we don’t intend to share wisdom, brighten someone’s day, make the world a better place, etc. at all, so much as we are really just wanting people to think “You know, he’s a pretty savvy guy.” It’s not about the message, it’s about us. We say we are trying to brighten another’s day, but I suspect we are just trying to brighten our own in the good old fashioned way – through hubris. They say “ I am sage. I am well read. I know who Jonas Salk is.”

Here, then, are some of my favorites, and why

· Dense, oblique: “A reasonable man adapts himself to suit his environment. An unreasonable man persists in attempting to adapt his environment to suit himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” G B Shaw. This one makes my head hurt.

· “As the fly bangs against the window attempting freedom while the door stands open, so we bang against death ignoring heaven.” Doug Horton. The absolute impenetrable nature of this one is topped only by the fact that I have absolutely no idea who Dough Horton is. But my life has been changed forever.

· “"Begin at the beginning," the King said gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop."” Lewis Carrol. Truly oblique.

· “Education is civil defense against media fallout.” Marshall McLuhan. Double-U Tee Eff?

I will end this, then, with my favorite aphorism by Voltaire, whom I have now managed to suggest to you that I have read, or at least know who the hell he was, by quoting him: “A witty saying proves nothing.”

Later.

What to Tweet

I’ve been refining and developing my Twitter style for a number of months now, and while I don’t claim to be any kind of expert Tweeter, I don’t think anyone really can. I mean, the app has only been around for a year or so, and nobody’s handing out degrees in it. There’s a lot of writing out there having to do with how to connect with people through following, but not so much on what to actually write about, so I thought I’d put down some of my observations.

Perhaps the biggest problem with getting started in Twitter is that at first you don’t have many people reading what you write. If you have a dozen followers, you may have less than 4 or 5 actually reading what you tweet. Of these 4 or 5, perhaps 1 or 2 will actually respond to your content. Because your first followers are probably pretty familiar to you, these tweets will tend to be about friends or family news, like “Are you going to Aunt Gladys’s birthday party next month?” Well, obviously you have to know who Aunt Gladys is, and care about her birthday to some degree, to even be able to relate to this tweet. I believe from what I’ve read that this was actually the original intent of Twitter; to provide for a little mini blog network of people who would all relate to the same people and events. You could speak in company or family shorthand, and everybody would know what you’re talking about. But then, as you get recommended to others, soon you have people following you who don’t know you at all, your family, your company, project, etc. So what do you tweet about? Popular topics read like the table of contents in your Sunday paper; Politics, news, views, culture, media, healh/wellness. This is where Twitter gets a little tricky, though. You still want to relate to the people you know in your immediate circle or original followers, but you also want to relate to a slightly broader audience. How do I “speak” in Twitter?

Developing a Twitter Voice

Some of my favorite tweeters handle this beautifully by blending personal messages with general interest tweets while still managing to sound colloquial at the same time. Imagine that you are hosting a small radio talk show with topics and questions coming in from people you mostly don’t know personally, but with whom you want at least a friendly interchange.

· Don’t lecture. Lecturers get unfollowed (by me, at least) pretty quickly. Twitter has become a great social media for political commentary. There is a fine line between commentary and lecture, but there is a line. Suggest, don’t command.

· Don’t speak in shorthand. In 140 characters, your challenge is to write something interesting and engaging while still remaining interesting to all of your followers. If you want to follow a thread with an individual, @reply them. Don’t post to your whole stream with something like “I can’t believe they think we’ll kowtow to this!” Who is they? Kowtow to what?

· Don’t be shy. Don’t be afraid to talk about what you’re thinking about. But when you do, make sure that you’re saying it in a way that will be interesting and relevant to all your followers.

· Have some interesting information. Either retweet something good or have something interesting to say. This doesn’t mean you have to be a White House reporter to come up with things of interest. I’ve read 140 character tweets from people who cracked me up explaining how they could not understand what their dog was trying to say to them. I’ve also been bored to tears by someone flatly reporting some epic event they attended.

· Use DMs. If you get involved in an ongoing discussion with another tweeter, remember all your followers are seeing the tweets. If it’s personal, or just not of interest to more than just you two, go to DMs.

· Don’t be too “quiet.” I follow a couple of people that tweet about once every three or four days. I follow them because a) I am related to them, or b) those tweets are very interesting (like coming from Air Force One).

· Don’t be too “loud”. Or frequent. You have to tweet enough to draw a crowd, but if you get to be like a circus barker, you will run the crowd off. Nobody wants to be in a conversation with someone who only talks and does not listen. Unless your famous and people want to hang on your every word, tweeting every 15 seconds about your life has got to be pretty darn interesting to hold people’s attention.

· Retweet, but not too much or little. Retweeting (forwarding and tacitly recommending someone else’s tweet) is a balance thing, too. It will gain you followers if done well, thoughtfully and actively, but too much is too much. Remember, people want to hear what you have to say, too. If you do nothing but retweet (and there are many) you better be really good at managing interesting content (and there are some).

· Abbreviate, but do it well. There’s a real skill to this. Tweetdeck actually has a pretty good tool for doing this for you, but I still abbreviate by hand. This is a balancing act, too. If you have so much to say such that you have to abbreviate too many words in a tweet, try rewording or breaking into two tweets. Overly abbreviated tweets get to looking like desperate telegraphed dispatches from the front.

· Be friendly, and where possible, personal. Bother to learn people’s names. Go to their profiles, learn about them. Engage. Simply using a person’s first name is an enormously effective tool in engaging someone. Many times, when people get a “bully pulpit” on Twitter through fame, notoriety, reputation, or whatever, they take on a sort of aloof, imperious tone. You better be awfully interesting to listen to if you take this approach.

· Tweet like somebody’s listening. Even if you are new and have just a few followers, develop a sort of conversational tone that sounds as if you are familiarly addressing a larger group of people. It lends an air of credibility. Don’t ever, ever, for any reason tweet either “Is anyone out there?” or “Hello? I’m bored. Is anyone listening?” They soon won’t be.

· Don’t admonish your followers. If you have a problem with what a particular tweeter or two had to say, address them in DM or at least in @reply. Don’t “blanket” your followers with admonitions. It comes off imperious and arrogant. The people you are really referring to probably won’t catch it, and the others will just be offended.

· Don’t Auto-tweet, auto-respond, ever for any reason. This is about interaction.

· If you are marketing something, attract people with tweets, not offers. If you have something interesting to say, I'l read it, even if you are selling something. If your only attempt to contact me is to spray me with offers, I'm not interested.

· Don’t repeat yourself. Don’t, for any reason, retweet the same tweet over and over. Even if you are not a bot and not auto-posting, you sure look like you are.

· Whenever possible, directly respond to ALL attempts to contact you. This is a core concept of Twitter, to me. Recently I had a surgery on a Friday and missed a whole “follow Friday” set of recommendations for people to follow me. I wound up sending out a general not-directed-at-anyone-in-particular tweet saying “Thanks for all the kind FFs”. I hate this. If someone took the time to individually recommend me, I feel I should reciprocate. If it’s simply an RT or an FF, I don’t feel this obligation. Twitter, to me, is all about interaction. There are plenty of people on Twitter (mostly famous folks) who joined with the notion that they’d use it as a networking tool, but soon found themselves followed by 100s of thousands of people who want to interact with them. Some handle this better than others. If you have 300 thousand followers, and you tweet that you attended a baseball game yesterday, and 387 people immediately ask you if you had a good time, of course you can’t respond to each. Rather than get defensive, distant, and aloof, perhaps it’s time to “close the door” (protect updates) so that people essentially have to follow the “friend request” model to follow you and ask for your approval. Perhaps it’s time to examine what Twitter means to you. If you have too many followers to relate to, perhaps FaceBook is a better solution. To me, one of the most disingenuous things a celebrity can do on Twitter is tweet really colloquial, personal stuff as if they are in a conversation, then reply to no one, (or one or two people). It comes off really manipulative and self-serving. I have followed a couple of lower level celebs with fewer than 2 or 3 thousand followers (there are tons of non celebs out there with ten times this number of followers) who followed almost no one in return and responded to no one. This has got to be the epitome of self-absorption. Unfollow. You are nowhere near as cool or hot as you think you are.

Twitter gets to be a bit like being at a large party. There are lots of people congregated in cliques talking about everything, laughing, joking, shouting, being obnoxious, being quiet and withdrawn. The trick is to manage to be engaged with as many people as you can at one time without appearing to be exclusive of people. Imagine you are at the center of one of the largest subgroups at a party. Several, if not many, folks are listening to what you say and some are replying to you. People from other nearby groups may even hear these conversations and may wander in. But remember that it’s a conversation, not a lecture. Don’t “hold forth” on a topic. This puts people off and acts as a barrier to engagement. Twitter is not very good for arguments. Flame wars 140 characters at a time, tend not to last long, and your followers get pretty tired of watching a mud fight pretty quickly. It’s too easy to block and unfollow contentious people.

So, you’re at the party. Hang around, introduce yourself to people. Initiate conversation. Listen intently and politely. Mingle. Move from group to group. Reply to everything said directly to you. If too many people are talking to you at once, maybe it’s time to go to a more exclusive party. But remember most of all that the coolest guy at the party is not the one who has the most people listening to him, or the one doing the most talking. He’s usually the guy in a spirited conversation with a few folks on a topic of interest to more than just a few, and he’s an avid listener as well as a good speaker.

Later.

Why I Follow (and Why I Don't) on Twitter

I find that as time goes by, my rules of engagement with Twitter evolve. I suppose a lot of this has to do with the fact that Twitter itself is evolving. As more people join, and more people follow and are followed by more people, the systems we all develop for how we relate to each other evolve. But, I’m evolving as well. I’ve developed – or am developing, rather – a Twitter personality (for better or worse).

My simple rule for following used to be “If I follow you, attempt to contact you, and you don’t respond, I unfollow”. That’s still pretty true, but I’ve tempered the view to be a little more flexible. There are a few “news and information” people I do follow that don’t respond to me. My hard and fast rule about “this is a social networking application” is not so hard and fast anymore. But this is still very different to me then following some celebrity who posts updates to their life with no intention of ever interacting with their followers. And this is fine; there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just not anything I choose to participate in. I’d rather pick up a copy of People.

I use to automatically follow anybody who followed me. This has shifted, as well, as the porn spam bots and the “I’ll show you how to get 100,000 followers a day!” tweeters proliferated. The first thing I do now when I get a new follower is to read a page or two of their tweets. You can get a feeling pretty quickly about what sort of Tweeter you’re dealing with this way. If the follower only posts once or twice a week, no follow. Here are some things I look for:

1. Do you only retweet? I still pretty much look for interaction on here, and with a few notable exceptions, “news feed” accounts like these don’t attract me much. If you do only retweet, it’s got to be pretty darn informational for me to follow. (And there are some. @raybeckerman, for example. Highly recommend.)

2. Are you selling something to me? I’m a “pull” rather than “push” consumer. I tend to seek out the things I want to buy rather than let them seek me. No follow. To me, it’s ok to use Twitter to “market yourself”, ie. Circulate your book idea, song, poetry, blog, as long as that’s not ALL you are doing. This is not the same as direct selling indiscriminately to me. We’re all trying to “market” ourselves in some way, after all. Just don’t let it be the only reason you’re using Twitter. (I’m looking for interaction.)

3. Do you only publish inspirational aphorisms? I have to say that these things all tend to blur together after a few days of reading them. Ghandi can’t possible have said all this stuff, can he? When was the last time you read one that was truly unique and new? They’re OK in small doses and when genuinely unique, but some folks do almost nothing but speak in aphorisms on Twitter. I was reading a stream of these between two Tweeters a few days ago, replete with “Good one!” and “Wow, where did you get this one!?” Like dueling aphorisms. Appears shallow, insincere and vapid after a while.

4. If your tweets are totally focused on getting me (and you) “100s of followers a day”, we probably don’t have much in common. Why would I want 100s of followers a day if it weren’t for the purpose of selling them something?

5. If you are a “life coach” I’m not much interested. My life coach has a few letters after her name (LPC, MA.) Call me old fashioned, but there are some things I think you ought to be government certified to do, and this is one of them. And I certainly didn’t find her through a free internet social network application.

6. How many people do you follow? If you already follow 10,000 people and your bio says you’re a “social networking media guru”, I’m pretty sure you’re not going to miss my tweets if I don’t follow you. Again, looking for REAL interaction.

7. Are you in stealth mode? I understand that identity theft is a big issue, but if it’s that big an issue, perhaps you shouldn’t be using the internet for social interaction. If you have no name, no location, no profile, why would I want to follow you? Again, it’s about interaction. Still, I have some great twitter friends who are in stealth mode, but they sought out real interaction with me first. That’s the key. I have only asked for one permission to follow a protected updates account, and that was because she was referred to me. This is too much like the FaceBook and MySpace “friends request” deal which is antithetical to the whole Twitter experience to me.

8. Are you following me in response to something I said? I will almost automatically follow someone in this case. A “blind follow”, or a follower who found you by bot doesn’t present much of a promise of interaction to me.

9. Do you have anything interesting to say? To me, this is the number one reason to follow, perhaps even above and beyond the chance of interaction. But more importantly, the question I ask is “Do you have anything interesting to say to me?”

10. How much do you tweet? Too much and too little are key to me. If you tweet once every 15 seconds or only once a week, I’m not much interested in you feed.

11. Do you have “auto this and that” turned on? There are some accounts that spit out tweets ever couple of minutes that are obviously coming out of some canned app. The same tweet will recycle every couple of minutes. Like following an answering machine.

Looking at this list, I think there are two keys to following. Interaction is certainly most important. Informational can trump this, but the information has to be from someone really interesting, or be in itself very unique and informational. I really think the very core concept of a social networking application is direct interaction, and choose to use Twitter this way. Your mileage may vary, though!

Later.

A Child's Ghost Story

Sometimes a story coming from a child bears greater weight than if it came from a college professor. Something about the pure simplicity and innocence of a child’s story lends it gravity. Sure, kids can fabricate from whole cloth, but this is almost immediately identifiable. A child generally doesn’t have the language skills and sophistication to fictionalize convincingly, which makes a non-fictional story from them all the more convincing.

We were riding home from a vacation a couple of years ago, passing the time telling ghost stories. My daughter, who was then about 8 years old began telling us of something that I at first took to be a dream, even though she insisted it wasn’t. She proceeded to tell the story, which, although I remember it clearly, I still managed to file away as a sort of half remembered dream. Fast forward a couple of years. Under similar circumstances – another long car trip – the subject came up again. If you ever want to really fact check a child’s story, ask them to retell it a few years later. She recounted the incident to us, almost verbatim, and I confess to a slight chill running through me. Here it is, my best attempt to tell it in her now 12 year old voice, with my questions interjected:

“You know how you are when you’re just about to fall asleep, not really awake, but not really asleep? I was in my old bed at mom’s house which looks right straight out at the hallway where the fish tank used to be. There was a little girl standing there. I wasn’t afraid, but I knew that I was no longer asleep at all, and actually leaned up on my elbows. She was about 7 or 8 years old, long blonde hair, but the ends were curly. She had a dress or nightgown on. I couldn’t tell which. It was either a frilly nightgown or an old style dress. She was standing looking at the wall.”

“Could you see her face?”

“Oh, yeah. I could see everything about her. It was like she had her own light. It wasn’t like she was glowing, but not really. It was like she was in light, but there was no light there. It was dark in the hall. And it wasn’t like she was glowing, because she wasn’t giving off any light on anything around her. She looked confused, like she was lost. She had a blanket or something like it in her hand, hanging over her arm and it looked like she was trying to figure out which way to go.”

“Did she move?”

“Yeah, she turned and looked at me!”

“You’re kidding!?”

“She looked right at me, we looked at each other, and she was just as surprised to see me as I was to see her.”

“And you weren’t afraid.”

“Unhuh. Not even after.”

“What do you mean after? What happened next?” (I was totally enthralled at this point.)

“She took a couple of steps towards me. It wasn’t like she was walking on the floor, though. Not like she was gliding, but walking, but it was like her feet weren’t where the floor was.” (I remember the chill I felt when she said this).

“Did she approach you?”

“Just a little, but then she just wasn’t there. Not like she faded, or vanished or anything. Not like anything I can explain. She just wasn’t there anymore. The hall was dark and empty, but I don’t remember her going away or anything. Just not there.”


I drove for a while after hearing this story a second time imaging it, trying to put myself in the scene, imagining my daughter laying there in some sort of communication with a girl about her age. Perhaps that’s why she saw her. My dad instinct kicked in and I felt a pang of concern for this little girl, lost, with her blanket. Perhaps she was looking for her daddy.

Later.