Like If You Agree

 

So far this year I have had two people –people I had known for years out in the solid three-dimensional world—convey through Facebook extremely hateful thoughts about things that matter to me.  Yet these nasty messages were delivered through the magic of the optimistic, positive-uplifting “like-if-you-agree” Facebook call to unanimity.

Why the hell do people bait the world’s cynics with something as tempting as “like if you agree”?  You know I won’t agree, and you know damn well I don’t want to like anything that says we should pray to end world hunger or only let men and women have families together. 

It has been said that Facebook is an app that lets you see which of your friends are racist or intolerant.  I have found that Facebook is actually an app that reveals which of your longtime friends or new acquaintances are homophobes, anti-vaccine theorists or urban myth rubes.  But that revelation comes through kitten pictures, baby angels and a crying Amazonian chief….and I feel personally taunted each time people post these.

That is why I mostly hate-read Facebook.  Occasionally, I deposit a gilded turd on someone’s wall, just to remind them that I cannot “like” their 10 herbs that will cleanse your organs or 20 foods that will cure your auto-immune disease, and that I must snicker at their expense—but gently.  After all, we’re all “friends” here!

Yet I wonder why we all become such cretins when we post each other’s bits of fake knowledge as we glean whatever images and sappy stories we gather from Facebook.  Where are our critical faculties? Why do we all have to agree and beg everyone to agree with us, when out in the world, we never expect such conformism? 

Interestingly, while they seem to demand monolithic agreement from their followers, the majority of my Facebook friends frequently posts status updates detailing how “crazy” they are, and how far from normal their out-of-control, zany lives happen to be.  You can almost imagine them tossing their berets up into the sky as they twirl around with abandon—almost.  Just how crazy ARE these friends, I wonder.  Each time I see them, they are law-abiding, contributing, tax-paying members of society who occasionally have a glass of wine and get the giggles, or make a risqué joke or two.  We are far removed from fecal art or hose-downs in padded rooms, so why this cachet of eccentricity that everyone adopts?  We know that the truly eccentric are not celebrated in our three-dimensional world.  Can we stop with the faux-crazy posturing?  Go DMS or go home.

What occurs to me is that none of the “friends” whose repeated, re-posted and clichéd words and images I see are human beings in any sense that I can grasp or comprehend.  They exist as simulacra, fleeting bundles of cultural currency which echo things that bother me or reassure me at any given point.  Facebook friends are copies of copies of people, caricatures of who I thought my friends might have been, but they have no life. 

 

What made you laugh this year?

Did I laugh this year? I must have.  I know I did.  Just last Sunday, I recall sitting on the couch with my husband, knowing he was preparing to leave us yet again for days on end, listening to my kids upstairs, marveling at their strangeness and just indulging in a fit of giggles–giggling in the face of despair, because all morning I had felt like tearing out of my own skin, I was so anxious.  At times I know I can still laugh like that, and it’s a release.

Often, at the end of a difficult day of teaching, I sit at my desk and a fellow-teacher indulges me with extremely childish puns and silly word games until we’re both almost in tears, breathless.  He happens to be one of the sternest, most feared teachers on staff, and I always wonder what our classes would think if they could see us hugging our knees and spinning on our office chairs as we hoot like the children we pretend to banish from our high-powered knowledge machines.

This laughter is at its core a strange mystery, because it shares space, within my heart, with a profound despair.  I laugh, but I have little joy in my daily labours of filling minds and forms and lesson plans.  Occasionally, I feel as though I may have helped a young person achieve something, grasp some thin strand of knowledge, but the school industrial complex is using up my passionate belief in the power of lil’ ol’ me.  Have you ever seen the dystopian film Brazil, by Terry Gilliam? My favourite scenes in that movie feature Robert De Niro as a renegade, free-wheeling plumber who appears out of nowhere to fix things.  Calm, cool and mysterious, he swings into high-rise apartments on ropes when needed, and then vanishes again into the sky. Yet only one thing leads to his undoing–one thing alone can trap him: when the endless piles of paperwork that clog every aspect of life, blown about by the wind, stick to him and seem to dissolve his very being into nothingness.  That is exactly how I imagine my disempowerment at school. Paperwork, administrative and managerial decisions, policies and budgets, are making me fall apart and break into pieces.

I could fall into the abyss laughing.  Indeed, I probably should.  Anger is not helping me.  Sadness is not keeping me sane.  I must remember to laugh, and jump.

5 Things – Describe 5 guilty pleasures

It seems almost impossible to think of five things I would describe as guilty pleasures.  For one thing, I’m not one to feel guilty about pleasure.  If pleasure is at all possible, my reaction is to feel lucky, not guilty.  I suppose some pleasures are trivial, or they seem silly; yet that renders them even more precious and evanescent in a way.  I love to find tiny fragments of pleasure somewhere in the course of a day or a week, and these are too often rare, these days.  I suffer from depression and a pervasive anxiety disorder, ergo the absence of a clenched gut, a pounding head, and the occasional withdrawal of my usual staggering waves of nausea constitute a pleasurable respite from myself.

True pleasure? It is not a complex or profound thing.

1.  Airports.

I get a huge charge from the strange energy found in large bustling airports.  I understand that one is meant to despise and curse air travel and all its attendant humiliations and hardships, but for me, the sounds, the gleaming surfaces, the human flow and chaos of an airport are absolutely thrilling.  Of course, I am usually traveling when I enter this realm of the nomadic, the adventurous, and I feel caught up in a great wave of potentialities.  Nothing makes me as cheerful as setting off on a journey at some gigantic airport, among motley fellow nomads (screaming babies, curmudgeoney oldsters, tiresome divas– none of that matters: we’re off!).  For many years, the airport was the gateway to my going off to meet the man I love after weeks of being apart.  It has since been imbued with an indelible romance, probably forever.

2.  Late night and early morning

During the week, I tend to go to bed quite late, and to get up extremely early.  Yet, as sleep-deprived as I often feel, I am reticent to give up those hours of being shut away in my office, with my books, in a little coccoon of quiet.  It has occurred to me that these are times in the day when I am responsible for no one but myself.  Other people’s lives are on hold, for a little bit.  The kids are asleep, my students, those hundreds of lives that will soon come pouring through my day, are not intruding yet on my immediate thoughts, and it feels good to just not have to manage or teach or direct or respond…at all. It’s the only time when nobody’s well-being or learning depends on my thoughts or decisions or actions.

3.  Not caring how I look

This one sounds awful and slovenly, but really it’s a great pleasure to me, at my age (mid-40s) to finally be perfectly OK with wearing the clothes that I like and not really giving two flying faps what anyone has to say about it.  After a lifetime of worrying about what image I was projecting to the world, and re-playing toxic recordings that a hateful parent had implanted in my self-hating mind, I now pull on what pleases me and fully invite the world to look away or kiss my skinny behind if it does not approve of what it beholds.  As a high-school teacher, I field my share of comments from colleagues and higher-ups, and amazingly, I really am unswayed from my resolve to be who I be, one baggy sweater and pair of army pants at a time.  English teachers are supposed to look hippie-artsy-messy and I’m just fulfilling that part of my students’ education.  As one of my Grade 9s noted earlier this year, “Madame, you have your own kind of swag,” and that feels good.

4.  The beach

Cliché, boring, but oh so true: this cold Canadian chick, despite knowing how harmful and silly and boring it is to throw her pale bod onto the sand and fry at the water’s edge, derives pleasure from lying on the beach.  Not sure why that is.  What primeval need is fulfilled by placing this white, thawing flesh out in the biting sun of a tropical climate, sweating and blistering myself into a kind of trance?  I once heard Leonard Cohen describe how, after a bout with depression, he lay in the sun in Greece until he felt a sliver of ice within him melt.  That image rings true to me.  I’m trying to melt my sliver of ice.

5.  Ice skating (in hockey skates)

At age 42 I decided to learn how to skate properly in my son’s hockey skates.  After much falling and flailing and taking humbling classes, I have become a good skater.  Going to the rink is something I love to do.  With some music in my ears, my sharpened skates, a nice sheet of ice at my feet, and not too many little kids or old people around me, I warm up my muscles and work my way to a fast, smooth, gliding pace.  It took me a long time to find my balance and the comfortable point at which I could weave my way around the ice naturally, and now it is one of the most calming things I am able to do.  I empty my mind; I breathe; I hear the cut of blade against ice.  All is smooth and cool and I go back to where I began.  It works for me.

Addition through subtraction – What have you let go of this year and how has it affected you?

This year I have let go of a fifth of myself, very tangibly, and not by choice.  Already fairly thin, I have dropped about 20lb, presumably for a host of non-frightening, non-lethal reasons, and yet this reacquaintance with my bones has coincided with some concurrent mental archaeology.  Decades ago, I would have been thrilled to drop several sizes and have my clothes bag off of me with no real sense of deprivation.  Under the gaze of an eating-disordered mother who was always eager for a self-hating disciple, I would have felt clean and pure and perfect.  Yet life serves up these ironies precisely to make us think about what we have wanted, and when we have wanted it, I believe.  Since I don’t have much use for painful thinness anymore, I am now too thin, and it has made me realize how close I am to the bone of my fears and my despair.

Not having much use for food anymore, I scare myself with how tempting is the urge to a dizzying nihilistic abandon.  With less and less sleep, I take very little pleasure in the things that used to nourish me.  I suffer from a pervasive anxiety that has made life a kind of endlessly repeated pit-of-my-stomach march through identical weeks.

Food, flesh are potent things.  I have spent a great deal of my life cooking for others, and recently I haven’t had much strength for that.  I let my teenaged children forage around the kitchen.  I pour what is left of my energy into teaching my students, feeling sabotaged by an administrative machinery that undercuts my best efforts.  I cannot nourish young people’s minds as I had hoped. I am tired, but never hungry.

One of the shopworn images of literature on anorexia is that the young girls who starve themselves seek to occupy as little space as possible in the world.  They want to be tiny, because “society” punishes large women who disturb established spatial boundaries with their size.  I must say that’s just too simple.  Society isn’t rewarding me for taking up less space.  What is true, however, is that I feel the lure of what it would be to disappear.  Gradually, almost imperceptibly, what happens is that you float into the territory where all this taking care of yourself for some kind of purpose would be optional.  And you could just opt out, silently, undramatically.  Bartleby-like.  You could just “prefer not to.”

I suppose this prompt was meant to be about letting go of fears and worries and finding peace.  I wish it could have been thus for me, this year.  But shedding of myself has been letting go of the illusion that I am coping and functioning, so perhaps there is good in that.  My thinning and vulnerable body is the trope. I am scared, I am cold, I am so very tired. I sit in a little room, with the heat cranked up, because I am too skinny, but also because I am starting to see that this is all too much for me, that I might break.