Are You there God? It's me, Carolyn

The knocking on the door awhile ago was the mailman with a summons. We are in violation of Township laws requiring a pool that is clean and in good repair. I needed to talk to someone and it occurred to me there was no one to call. No close friends who could commiserate, no family who would have an answer because their answer isn't the same as mine...FILL IT IN!!! So I started to pray and it then occurred to me that God has been so busy with all the problems of the world, He couldn't possibly have been listening to my pleas. I'm not saying I don't believe. It was faith that got me through breast cancer and my husband's prostate cancer. It was God who brought me back into the fold that day on that cold operating table. But on the little things like lack of money to fix the house and yard and pay the bills and the health insurance and the broken down 16 yro car; He is mostly absent or at least isn't giving me a clue as to how to survive LIFE.

So here I am talking to you. You the people who happily or unhappily follow my sometimes blog posts. I need to vent and the cats aren't listening and neither is God, apparently. I don't usually cry but today the wellsprings have sprung and I can't seem to stem the flow. What do I do? How do I convince my family we can't repair the rips, tears and troubles of a 30 yro liner that long ago gave up the ghost. And that every year brings the neighbor's to their decks and backyard fences to complain. This time maybe the summons to appear in court and a fine may be enough to convince my DH and DS that the pool is NOT NEEDED anymore. I can see the backyard flat and smooth with no pool just lots and lots of dirt.

OK...thanks for listening...I'm going to go blow my nose and find out how much dirt it costs to fill in a huge, old, ugly, festering pool. I love you all for listening and maybe God will have the answer! At least He sent this quote my way earlier this morning: Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day. -Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

TWITTER is dead

At least the twitter that I joined back in the day when the idea was young and we were all naive about social marketing and networking. It was a quick way to update friends and find out their plans for the day ahead or the upcoming weekend. Messages would fly back and forth all day long. Personal messages that said "I hear ya", "I'm with ya" "I'll give ya a call tonight"...Now I'm hard pressed to get anyone to respond to a question or even a comment to a fellow tweet. With tweetdeck, hoot suite, ping, mobile web, etc. everyone is busy twittering their doings without ever once having to actually go to the web and type in an answer and perhaps see that someone cares about what they've said.

What was once a way to connect in a friendly way is now a huge marketplace where everyone is trying desperately to get someone to buy their product, join their group, become a follower. I'd say 89% of Twitter devotees like it that way. They don't want to get personal; they can get out their advertising message; they can get you to where THEY want you to go with a link; and perhaps they can even get you to buy their product. But they don't have to make you their 'friend' and really care about YOU unless your money is green and coming their way.

Social networking is a huge market. Just look at the success of Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter. Everyone is out to make a buck and sometimes a fortune. Do I think that's wrong? Of course not! Everyone is entitled to make a living and the better living they can make for their family the better the family can live. I just miss the once personal touch of reaching out to a 'friend' and have him/her take a few moments to say hi, how's your day going? Now it's mostly a tweet moments later but usually with another link to a product or service!

I'm not saying that I haven't used Twitter and FaceBook to help move along my eBay and Etsy sales because I have. But I've never done JUST that. I always find a way to connect to at least a dozen people a day just to tell them what they posted helped or gave me a laugh or yes, I'll be praying that their dog/cat gets well quickly. For the most part they go unanswered or perhaps just unseen in that ever swiftly flowing stream of words. But sometimes a long time 'friend' will reply with a personal comment and those are the ones that make me feel the best. It means I'm not just another message in the stream but they remember who I am and think I'm worth 140 letters.

Maybe I'm taking Twitter and FB all too seriously. Maybe I shouldn't care if QuickJet's dog just died and he's heartbroken or that MollysMaid has a sick kid and what would be the best way to break up congestion. But I DO care about those things because you see...that's what Twitter was all about in its early days. Days that perhaps only I miss.

You bet I'll post a link to this on Twitter and you can rest assured that I hope it stirs up a bit of controversy. I hope it draws a few comments even if they are all negative, because that will mean that there is still hope. Hope that the REAL Twitter is still alive and there are still people willing to do more than post a link to an Etsy listing or a conference call without ever once stopping to say something personal. In the early part of last century it was called etiquette. In the nineties we called it netiquette; today I don't think we call it anything at all.

It's been a long time between posts but...

I've been re-thinking my artistic direction and when I do that I hunker down or 'turtle' as I tell my friends. I need to think about what I doing and where I am going. I find that this discourse with myself happens every 9 months or so. Kinda like a pregnancy and birthing or re-birthing as it were.

One of the things that has been much on my mind is copyright infringement. As I've moved further away from my painting and collaging and more into the digital world I find that each time I scan a Vintage photo or even right-click on the work of a grandmaster I ask myself if what I am doing is 'legal'. In today's age of right click & save, it seems that more and more people think it's OK to use the work of others in their own creations.

Needing to take a break from my ruminations I took a look at Twitter to see what some of my cyber friends were up to this New Year. One Tweet in particular caught my eye. Margot "Madge" Potter is someone who always has something to say that needs saying. I've followed her tweets for a long time and today I saw a link to her blog that put into words what I've been thinking about for weeks. Copyright infringement in all its derivations. Click on the title of this post to read what she has to say. I can't say it any better so I won't infringe on her post by saying more!

I've almost birthed what I think will be my new and hopefully lasting direction in 'art'. I was doing this work six months before my diagnosis of breast cancer and left it behind to physically feel the art in my hands. Art is healing and during the last six years it's what I've needed to do almost daily. Now I think I need to return to my photography and my digital collage. I'll post more when the labor pains have subsided and my Wild Gypsy Art shop on Etsy is fully stocked once again.