Glum thoughts at Christmas
Dec. 22nd, 2010 03:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jayfurrI've been 'taking vacation' the last couple of days. I've been off in Boston training at a customer there for a couple of weeks and I've got a crazy busy travel schedule coming up starting next week (Boston again, then South Carolina for two weeks, and so on thereafter). So: I'm supposed to spend the time getting sane and decompressed.
Mostly I've been shopping online, attempting to find the little quirky things that make Christmas nice when you're a moderately depressed semi-employed accountant (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
caroleotter), and when I haven't been doing that, I've been taking loads of garbage to the dump. Stuff from our basement, mostly, operating on the "if I were to die, what would Carole have to wade through as she was going through my effects?" principle. If I could visualize her going "why the HECK did he have a boxful of THIS?" in the weeks after my funeral, it seems like I might as well have done with it and take it directly to the dump NOW, saving her the inevitable effort.
Not that I plan on dying any time soon. But if there's one thing that turning gray at 43 reminds you of, it's the fact that none of us are forever. Not in an Earthly sense, anyway, and I'll leave the debate over what, if anything, comes after that for another day.
But anyway. Among the various random things I've been doing, I've been spending a little time browsing Facebook and Twitter. I spent a lot of time on Twitter during the months that I, and my friends, were going off to walk the Susan G. Komen 3-Day For The Cure, but now that we're in the slow long cold part of the year when no one is doing much training and the next walk is seven months away, talk has dropped off significantly. On the other hand, Facebook began tossing me dozens of suggestions a day of people I should add as friends based on shared acquaintances and interests -- and judging my their pink-clad Facebook profile photos, most of those people are fellow 3-Day walkers and crew.
So, I've sent out a few random friend requests, generally to people that I seem to share 20+ 3-Day friends with, and have accepted a few requests back, mostly from the same crowd. I grant you that I don't actually KNOW most of these people in the traditional sense, although there's every chance I met them in one of the four 2010 cities I walked or crewed.
I've had the sense to click through to the profiles of the people I've friended, and the results are what you'd expect: a lot of people playing Farmville and throwing 'snowballs' at each other and groaning about shopping.
Nothin' special.
But I also had two of the more sobering kind of Facebook situations today. The kind that you tend to get now and then if you're active in the fight against breast cancer, but not every day... you friend someone who's dead.
What generally happens is that a family member decides to keep the Facebook presence of the dear departed alive after their death... issuing and accepting friend requests in hopes of keeping their memory alive. It's pretty upsetting when you look back after a year and see the whole sad story laid out: the months and months of chemo and radiation treatments followed by a cheerful "I think I beat it!" ... followed by the "I got some bad news at the oncologist" message, followed by the "I'm determined to KEEP ON FIGHTING" message... and then, unfortunately, after weeks and months of intermittent updates, the final word in the story, posted in a different tone of voice, the "We lost her today" message.
I hate those.
No, I don't hate the family members for keeping up the faith after they've buried their wife and mom. I don't mind them keeping the profile online. Why shouldn't they?
What I hate is the feeling that they give me. I've seen LOTS of Facebook pages written by people actively fighting breast cancer, and by people who've won for now, who are multi-year survivors. But their pages start off the same way as the others... the ones that didn't have a happy ending. And I know that even a multi-year survivor can have the same bad outcome.
And while I hope all my friends and acquaintances live long, happy lives free of breast cancer, I really wish that I didn't have the rotten nagging doubts in my mind that I've got right now.
End of the story: I wish I didn't have to expect more post-mortem friendings. But until we've made a hell of a lot more progress in the fight against breast cancer... in the form of early detection, treatment, and prevention... sigh.
Mostly I've been shopping online, attempting to find the little quirky things that make Christmas nice when you're a moderately depressed semi-employed accountant (
caroleotter), and when I haven't been doing that, I've been taking loads of garbage to the dump. Stuff from our basement, mostly, operating on the "if I were to die, what would Carole have to wade through as she was going through my effects?" principle. If I could visualize her going "why the HECK did he have a boxful of THIS?" in the weeks after my funeral, it seems like I might as well have done with it and take it directly to the dump NOW, saving her the inevitable effort.Not that I plan on dying any time soon. But if there's one thing that turning gray at 43 reminds you of, it's the fact that none of us are forever. Not in an Earthly sense, anyway, and I'll leave the debate over what, if anything, comes after that for another day.
But anyway. Among the various random things I've been doing, I've been spending a little time browsing Facebook and Twitter. I spent a lot of time on Twitter during the months that I, and my friends, were going off to walk the Susan G. Komen 3-Day For The Cure, but now that we're in the slow long cold part of the year when no one is doing much training and the next walk is seven months away, talk has dropped off significantly. On the other hand, Facebook began tossing me dozens of suggestions a day of people I should add as friends based on shared acquaintances and interests -- and judging my their pink-clad Facebook profile photos, most of those people are fellow 3-Day walkers and crew.
So, I've sent out a few random friend requests, generally to people that I seem to share 20+ 3-Day friends with, and have accepted a few requests back, mostly from the same crowd. I grant you that I don't actually KNOW most of these people in the traditional sense, although there's every chance I met them in one of the four 2010 cities I walked or crewed.
I've had the sense to click through to the profiles of the people I've friended, and the results are what you'd expect: a lot of people playing Farmville and throwing 'snowballs' at each other and groaning about shopping.
Nothin' special.
But I also had two of the more sobering kind of Facebook situations today. The kind that you tend to get now and then if you're active in the fight against breast cancer, but not every day... you friend someone who's dead.
What generally happens is that a family member decides to keep the Facebook presence of the dear departed alive after their death... issuing and accepting friend requests in hopes of keeping their memory alive. It's pretty upsetting when you look back after a year and see the whole sad story laid out: the months and months of chemo and radiation treatments followed by a cheerful "I think I beat it!" ... followed by the "I got some bad news at the oncologist" message, followed by the "I'm determined to KEEP ON FIGHTING" message... and then, unfortunately, after weeks and months of intermittent updates, the final word in the story, posted in a different tone of voice, the "We lost her today" message.
I hate those.
No, I don't hate the family members for keeping up the faith after they've buried their wife and mom. I don't mind them keeping the profile online. Why shouldn't they?
What I hate is the feeling that they give me. I've seen LOTS of Facebook pages written by people actively fighting breast cancer, and by people who've won for now, who are multi-year survivors. But their pages start off the same way as the others... the ones that didn't have a happy ending. And I know that even a multi-year survivor can have the same bad outcome.
And while I hope all my friends and acquaintances live long, happy lives free of breast cancer, I really wish that I didn't have the rotten nagging doubts in my mind that I've got right now.
End of the story: I wish I didn't have to expect more post-mortem friendings. But until we've made a hell of a lot more progress in the fight against breast cancer... in the form of early detection, treatment, and prevention... sigh.
