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Mar. 1st, 2015 02:03 pmWriter's Block: Friendship
Dec. 24th, 2014 09:19 amWho was your first best friend? Are you still in contact with them? If not, what would you say to them if you could talk to them today?
I posted previously about my 50th elementary school reunion in the Big Apple, which was an amazing blast from the past. There has been a core of us that has stayed in touch over the years, but getting so many of us together in one place after half a century was an amazing experience.
One of those present qualifies as my first best friend:

There he sits, in the back row next to our sweet nursery school teacher. I'm not going to tell you which one I am, but if you know anything at all about me, it will be immediately obvious.
Walt and I were good, good buddies. We did all sorts of things together. We had a lot of similar interests. We would visit each other's homes regularly, go trick-or-treating together, visited museums, attended parties, became passionate about Duncan yo-yos together, collected Matchbox cars, enjoyed Lost in Space and Green Acres, had birds, loved cats, shared many other friends, and once wickedly threw mud at his parents' car when he was visiting (I lived out in the suburbs for a year) so perhaps he wouldn't have to go home so early.
Walt had many interesting experiences in his own right. He once related to me the tale of how, as a young lad working one of his first jobs, he was invited in by a kind lady for milk and cookies or some such. Turned out it was Katharine Hepburn. How would that be?
Sixth grade came and went, and the boys at Hunter College Elementary School were all expelled (Hunter High at that time only accepted girls.) We went our separate ways, Walt to McBurney and myself to Cheshire; time rolled on, I raised my family in Utah and he settled in California, where he went on to become a successful producer, listing Spin City among his credits.
The astonishing thing about this friendship - and many others that we had at the time - is their durability. Over time, we have been able to get together in this group or that, and it was as though we had seen each other yesterday, instead of after 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 years; threads of conversation were picked up without a beat.

You can see Walt and me in this picture taken in 2012 as we toured the old HCES campus; several of us in this picture can be seen in the shot from 1954.
Walt and I stay in touch, and I always look forward to the opportunity to get together with him and his delightful wife for another mini-reunion. Relationships like this can't be bought.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
In the last couple of days, two individuals have written about experiments that they conducted at Facebook.
Mat Honan, at Wired, wrote about what happened to his Facebook feed when he "liked" absolutely everything he saw for two days.

At the same time, Elan Morgan was conducting a similar experiment... by not liking anything at all, and when she saw Honan's post, was inspired to write about her experience.

Before you go on, I recommend you read both articles in their entirety. There are some good thoughts in each, addressing more than the facebook issue. I will quote this, from Schmutzie's blog post:
The first thing I noticed was how difficult it was to not like things on Facebook. As I scrolled through updates, my finger instinctively gravitated towards the Like button on hundreds of posts and comments. It has become a gut-level, Pavlovian response. I saw updates I liked or wanted others to know I liked, and I found myself almost unconsciously clicking my approval.
The Like is the wordless nod of support in a loud room. It’s the easiest of yesses, I-agrees, and me-toos. I actually felt pangs of guilt over not liking some updates, as though the absence of my particular Like would translate as a disapproval or a withholding of affection. I felt as though my ability to communicate had been somehow hobbled. The Like function has saved me so much comment-typing over the years that I likely could have written a very quippy, War-and-Peace-length novel by now.
I have experienced much the same thing myself. Clicking that "like" button has become addictive, similar to the upvote/downvote arrows over at reddit. Both these articles made me think over the nature of my participation at Facebook.
A side note: my feed is full of other things, of course - lots of promotion from people running businesses, lots of politics, and - it goes without saying - lots of kittens and Pinterest shares. But, it is worth mentioning, no advertisements - I use FB Purity, which cleans up my Facebook feed in a way that makes it tolerable to use and much less noisy and chaotic. Social Fixer accomplishes the same thing. If you're not using one of these, I highly recommend checking them out.
As for myself, I use Facebook to share things that are important to me; ideas, feelings, issues that I feel deserve attention, and to keep in touch with those people in my life who help me move forward. The "like" button has been a quick way of exchanging "strokes," a concept introduced by transactional analysis and defined as "a unit of recognition." As people, we need these strokes. Those who don't get them on a regular basis end up feeling alone and isolated; even those who are introverted by nature and prefer solitude to social interaction need this kind of recognition and contrive to get it in other ways that serve them best, including self-stroking.¹
Mr. Honan noticed that by liking everything, he disovered that
"My News Feed took on an entirely new character in a surprisingly short amount of time. After checking in and liking a bunch of stuff over the course of an hour, there were no human beings in my feed anymore. It became about brands and messaging, rather than humans with messages."
Contrariwise, Schmutzie (Elan Morgan's alternate pseudonym) discovered that refusing to like anything and posting meaningful comments instead resulted in the exact opposite:
"Now that I am commenting more on Facebook and not clicking Like on anything at all, my feed has relaxed and become more conversational. It’s like all the shouty attention-getters were ushered out of the room as soon as I stopped incidentally asking for those kinds of updates by using the Like function. I have not seen a single repugnant image of animal torture, been exposed to much political wingnuttery, or continued to drown under the influx of über-cuteness that liking kitten posters can bring on. (I can’t quit the kittens.)"
Yeah, I enjoy the kittens, too. But what a contrast! By not using the "Like" button, one effectively short-circuits Facebooks ad-targeting algorithm and allows a more human environment to prevail.
I can't tell you how much I like this concept... but I'm not going to click the button.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
¹That's not what I meant and you know it. Get your mind out of the gutter.
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thefoxaroo
Jun. 17th, 2014 07:31 amhttp://www.boredpanda.com/steam-engine-train-lost-tracks-of-time-matthew-malkiewicz/
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r_caton
May. 19th, 2014 03:17 pm-Cheers,
Wolfington
The joy of being different
Mar. 24th, 2014 12:40 pmThe Joy of Being Different: http://playingintheworldgame.wordpress.com/2014/03/24/the-joy-of-being-different/
The Old Wolf has spoken.
I can haz job.
Jan. 14th, 2014 02:22 pmI won't bore you with a list of all the places I applied for regular or even semi-regular work during that time - it would be depressing. When you look for a job at 55, they laugh at you. If you're over 60, they think you're crazy.
Anyway, I applied with another Temp agency about a month ago, and they found me a position with an engineering concern down in Nephi, Utah - only 18 miles away from my home, not a bad commute at all, since it's against the flow of traffic and the speed limit is 80.
I'm learning all sorts of new things - these people are largely fiber-optic network contractors, and I've never paid so much attention to manholes and splice boxes and right-of-ways and easements and property lines in my life. A completely different world, but it's regular work and a regular paycheck to supplement pension and Social Security is a nice prospect. I have no idea how long it will last, but I'm grateful for each day.
The Old Wolf has spoken.