Friends and Unfriending (an IWSG post)

This post is brought to you by the letter "I." Also, it is brought to you by the letter "W." Oh, and "S" and "G," too. That would be IWSG better known as the Insecure Writer's Support Group dreamed up by Alex Cavanaugh while he was sleeping. No, really, he was asleep. The letters fell on his head, and he had to make them mean something. His first option was "SWIG," but he felt that didn't really convey anything meaningful. Take a swig of what, right? Next, he went with "WIGS," but he didn't want to imply anything or insult anyone. Since nothing else was working, he threw the letters into the air and got IWSG, which had to mean something even if he didn't know what that was. After Rusty supplied the word "insecure," the rest fell into place.

This month, I'm actually going to talk about an insecurity, something I tend not to do because I tend to be mostly secure. Some would say overconfident, but I think more like comfortably confident. Well, in context, at any rate. I'm not, like, Barney Stinson confident. I know what things I'm good at, and I'm confident in those abilities. That does not extend to playing Skylanders with my kids as my younger son showed me the other day as he continued to clobber me in player vs player mode. I think my video gaming skills are beginning to atrophy since I haven't done any real playing of, well, anything in a few years, and the last thing I played to any extent was one of the Indiana Jones Lego games on the Wii.
But I digress...

My biggest area of insecurity, right now, is being unfriended (which is now a word even if my spell checker is telling me it's not (which is not to say that I agree with it's word worthiness, but no one asked me (still, it's better than LOL being a word, and I still can't figure out how that made it through))) or unfollowed or whatever. But it's not even that, it's the not knowing WHY! Or who. I mean, if Facebook would just do us the courtesy of telling us who unfriended us, it might cut out a lot of the anxiety. Even knowing that, generally, the reasons have nothing to do with me specifically, as often it is actually just people deactivating their accounts, it's hard for me not to question myself every time I lose one of those FB friends. "Who unfriended me?" "Did I do something to cause it?" The questions, they plague me!

Sometimes, there is a reason. For instance, there was this whole thing in the past year over this review that I did. I'm not gonna give names or anything, but let's just say the review wasn't a good one. The author had friended me on FB prior to the review with this quote:

Andrew, I'm excited for you to read it and I will accept any review you give, harsh or glowing or harshly glowing. Get on it already!

I sort of expected that to be the truth; unfortunately, it ended up not being the truth, and the recipient of the review attacked my character over the review (I think the most tossed around term was "douche"), so I wasn't surprised when he unfriended me. However, FB didn't tell me it was he that unfriended me, so I scoured my friend list trying to figure out who it was, which is a maddening thing to do (since some of the people on there are from back when I used to play Farmville and stuff, and I don't really know who they are), and it was a long time before I thought to check to see if he was one of the people that recently dropped me.

And he's not the only person that has unfriended me over review issues. But, then, when someone friends me over the prospect of a review for his/her book that does not mean I'm going to give a good review just so that s/he will be my friend. I mean, that is so high school. "Do my homework for me, and I'll be your friend" kind of thing. In the end, those situations don't bother me. When I know that's what's going on.

Anyway...
I've been struggling at around 370 friends for months, now. I've hit 374 two or three times and dropped back down to 370 again every time. Every time I lose a number, I scour my list trying to figure out who it was, because I want to know WHY! My wife tells me I'm being silly, and, in my head, I know that I am, but this whole thing really is an insecurity for me, especially since I'm in a field where I "need" to build my friends list and my followers. I used to be fairly particular about friend requests, even when I was playing Farmville, and turned down a lot of the gaming requests I got. These days, I tend to not be very particular and accept pretty much every request I get, since it's everyone is a "potential." Don't ask me what that means; I just know that it's so.

The funny thing about all of this is that in life I'm not so concerned with "friends." I tend to just do my thing and people that want to join in can and those that don't want to can go their own way. I've always been like this, so I've bounced about a bit in the number of friends I've had at any given time based on what I was interested in and where I happened to be. Being the "weird" one has never bothered me, unlike my brother, who always wanted lots of friends and to fit in. Of course, he was one of the ones always telling me that if I just wouldn't be so "weird," I'd have more friends, and he couldn't understand why I was so unconcerned with it all.

But all of that is different now that I have to deal with it on a faceless numbers basis. It's not like walking down the hall in high school and knowing who is and is not your friend, because you can't easily see these people behind the numbers on facebook or blogger or wherever, so it bothers me when that number changes and I wonder if it was me even when I know I should be even less concerned over it now than I have ever been in my life, and that was not at all, which tells me that number fluctuations shouldn't bother me. And, yet, they do.

They do! And I can't stand it! Yes, it's enough to make me neurotic. That is, if I wasn't already.

So there you go... my insecurity. Do with that what you will.

However, up there on the right, you might see where it says "FIND ME HERE!" If you do see that and if you want to find me in those places, you can go over and catch me on facebook and goodreads as well. Just, if you do, don't unfriend me without letting me know, okay?

Getting the Wrong Message

We live in an age of t-shirts. They're like membership badges. You wear a shirt, and people comment on it, and it let's you know whether or not they're in your club. Unsurprisingly, I have several Star Wars t-shirts. I used to have a lot more, but most of them have been retired. Okay, so, yeah, I still have them; I just don't wear them anymore, because an awful lot of them are 20 years old and not really fit for wearing anymore. A have a couple of Sandman t-shirts, I have Animaniacs and "Pinky and the Brain" t-shirts, and I have this t-shirt:

(I also have a lot of other comic book related shirts, but I don't really have time to list all the shirts I have!)

I imagine that emblem is familiar to most of you out there, but, surprisingly, it's one of the least recognized shirts I have. It's also one of the most commented on shirts I have. Whedon fans will almost always say something, but, frequently, people who don't know anything about Firefly will say something like, "Nice message. We could all use more serenity." I just sort of nod and grin and say, "Yeah, we could," while thinking something like "if you only knew."

When I was in college, I was in this writing group. A lot of (pretentious) poetry was batted around during the meetings. One of the rules was that you were not allowed to claim your own work. We were also encouraged to comment on our own work so that no one would know it was ours by our silence. Non-committally comment, of course. That was hard for a lot of people, so most everyone just sat silently when one of their pieces was being read and commented on.

One night, there was a particular poem that was read. I don't remember what it was about, but, evidently, no one was getting it. The author of the poem was trying to restrain himself, but I could tell he was getting frustrated, and he was really fighting with himself to keep from blurting out how wrong everyone was. Including the professors. One professor in particular. Awkwardly enough, I was the one that caused him to explode, but it was because I got it right. I gave my interpretation, and he slapped the table, jumped up, and pointed at me yelling "Yes! Finally! Someone gets it!"

I felt kind of bad. Bad in that it was my fault he lost his cool. It was kind of weird that he lost it over his message getting through when he'd managed to hold it together through everyone getting the "wrong" message. But that's kind of the point: there is no "wrong" message. There is a failure to communicate the intended message, but it's hard to say that a message pulled from a reading is wrong. Unless, of course, you're Barney Stinson rooting for the bully in The Karate Kid. Barney just gets it wrong, but it's not like that for most of us.

No, most of us carry away a valid message even if it isn't quite the one the author intended, and you know what? That's okay. None of the people giving the "wrong" interpretation of the poem that night had messed anything up; they just didn't quite understand the point the author was trying to make. That doesn't mean those other points weren't there, because we weave into our writing things we have no idea are there until someone else points them out to us. And that's okay, too. That's why other people can see things about us that we can't always see, and it's why we can learn about ourselves through other people and the way other people read what we've written.

You know what else? I don't think Joss would be upset about people coming away with a message of serenity because if the t-shirt based on his movie. I think he'd say, "That's okay."